


A Dish of Muggle and Squib

by bragisapprentice



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Hogwarts Second Year
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:35:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 22,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25283980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bragisapprentice/pseuds/bragisapprentice
Summary: What would happen if a Muggle and a Squib were admitted to Hogwarts?  What if a House Elf wanted to study there with them?  Could they manage?  Is there any place for non-wizards in the wizarding world?  Entering Hogwarts in the year the Chamber of Secrets opens, one Muggle, one Squib, and on House Elf are going to find out.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

“You must have read it wrong,” Mrs. O’Flaherty said over the bustle of King’s Cross. “There _is_ no Platform 9 ¾.”

Finnegan squinted again at the damp ticket crumpled in his hand as he hustled along after his parents. “That’s what it says, Mam. Nine and three-quarters.” He wiped the sweat off his forehead with his jacket sleeve and pushed up his glasses. “Maybe it’s a sign.”

Mr. O’Flaherty stopped abruptly and turned around. “A sign of what, son?”

“That this is all a mistake,” Finnegan said. “I told you it was, Da. I’m not a wizard.”

Mrs. O’Flaherty came back and bent down so that her eyes were level with his. “How do you know you’re not?” she asked him, tousling his hair. “A month ago we didn’t know _anyone_ was a wizard. And you read the Pigwarts letter yourself.”

“Hogwarts,” Mr. O’Flaherty said proudly, clapping his son on the shoulder. “I don’t expect any eleven-year-old feels very much like a wizard before they train up, do they? Wait here—I’ll see if I can’t find a conductor or something.”

Finnegan watched him go. “I’m not a wizard, Mam,” he said without much hope.

Her green eyes squinted kindly at him. “Give it a try, eh? Just one year—you said you’d try it for one year.”

“I know, but—”

“We would so like for you to have opportunities,” she went on. “To be something other than a cook like your da and me.”

“I like cooking,” Finn said. “I’m good at it.”

She rubbed his arms bracingly. “I know. Still…”

“This lad says he knows where the platform is,” Mr. O’Flaherty said, bustling through the crowd with a boy a little taller than Finnegan.

“Heard him trying to ask a Muggle,” the boy said over the top of his luggage trolley. “You were on the flight from Dublin the other day, weren’t you? I thought I saw you.” He stuck out his hand to Finnegan. “Seamus Finnegan, by the way.”

Finnegan almost forgot to shake back. “That’s my name!” he said.

“Seamus?”

“Finnegan.”

The boy’s eyebrows scrunched up. “We can’t have two Finnegans. Tell you what: we’ll call you Finn. How’s that?”

“Er, fine I guess,” Finnegan said.

“It’s this way.” And Seamus took off, talking over his shoulder. “I’m about to start my second year. You must be Muggle-born. I’m half and half myself.”

“Muggle?” Finnegan asked, but at that moment, Seamus disappeared with his trolley through a brick barrier.

Finnegan blinked. Don’t be ridiculous, he told himself: Seamus had disappeared _around the back_ of a brick barrier. But suddenly Seamus’s head popped back out and said, “You just walk through it. Come on, then!”

Finnegan looked back at his parents, who were staring with their mouths open. 

“Well, I can’t look any more ridiculous than I already feel,” he said to himself, and walked toward the barrier, bracing for impact.

None came. When he opened his eyes again, he was on another platform in front of a bright red train. Parents and children were hurrying about, sending luggage one direction and students the other. Seamus entrusted his trolley to someone in a uniform and came back dusting off his hands. “Keep your robes with you: you’ll want to put them on before we get there. You all right now?”

“Yes,” Finnegan lied. “Thanks.”

Seamus waved merrily and ran off, shouting greetings to a pair of boys he called Dean and Neville.

“Well bless my buttons, as my gran used to say,” Mr. O’Flaherty observed as he stumbled through the barrier clutching his wife’s hand. “It’s like magic, isn’t it? I’ll get your luggage stowed.”

Mrs. O’Flaherty patted her hair back into place as though the barrier had mussed it, but when she saw a family of redheads hurrying by looking even more frazzled than herself, she stopped patting. Finnegan looked at her hopelessly and she squatted down to look him in the eye again.

“Just for a year,” she said, “and if you don’t like it, we’ll put you in St. Brendan’s with Miles and Joe.” She glanced around for Mr. O’Flaherty before adding more quietly, “Pigwarts doesn’t charge tuition, dear. If it turns out you like it…well…it would be a relief, that’s all.”

Finnegan sighed, resigning himself. There was a price to being the youngest of six children. “Hogwarts,” he corrected her.

The train rolled out of the station before Finn could find a seat. He went from compartment to compartment, finding each one full of students who were much taller than he was, if not any wider. He pressed on, beginning to hope that if he reached the end of the train without finding an empty spot, the conductor might make him get off and go back to King’s Cross.

“Hey Crabbe, Goyle,” said a sharp voice from a compartment whose door had just slid open. “Look here: I just found a miniature version of you. He’s just got to lose the glasses.”

A pale, pointy-faced boy was leering at Finn. Two large boys lumbered out of the compartment and looked Finn up and down slowly.

“We were bigger than that last year,” one of them observed.

The pointy-faced boy smirked. “Only vertically. I’m Daco Malfoy,” he said. “And you are?”

“Finne…Finn…O’Flaherty,” Finn stammered.

The smirk again. “You sure? So what do you think, Finne-Finn O’Flaherty? Is it Slytherin for you?”

“Slythe-what?”

The interest in the pale boy’s face switched off like a lightbulb. “Muggle born,” he sneered. “Useless scum.” And he turned on his heel and led the other boys back into the compartment.

“Don’t look so glum,” said a voice from another doorway. “He only wanted to make you one of his goons. You don’t want to be friends with him.”

Finn had more or less worked that out for himself already. The girl who had spoken was thin and willowy, all elbows and knees and a sheet of black hair that hung almost to her waist. Her face framed by that straight black hair was almost a perfect heart shape.

“You can sit with me,” she said. “I came early and got a compartment.”

Not sure whether to be grateful or disappointed that there was a seat for him after all, Finn followed her in and slid the door closed. “I’m Finn O’Flaherty,” he said, and was immediately pleased with himself for getting it right this time.

“Imogen Yang,” she said, shaking his hand. She had a surprisingly strong grip. “So you’re Muggle-born?”

“I guess so?”

She tossed her hair over her shoulder. “The Yangs go back over a millennium,” she said. “They were in the emperor’s court when Hogwarts was nothing but an empty field.”

“Oh,” Finn said.

“We’re still in government,” she went on. “My father works in the Ministry of Magic’s foreign office in Hong Kong. My mother works for the Muggle Prime Minister in London—she’s MI-8, though of course he doesn’t know that.”

“I thought it only went up to six,” Finn said.

“Muggle Intelligence,” Imogen explained. “Witches and wizards who keep an eye on things in the Muggle world. There are eight levels of that.”

“Oh,” Finn said again. “You must know a lot already.”

Suddenly her breezy air evaporated. She bent her head and let her hair fall like a screen between them. “Yes, I guess so. My parents expect a lot of me. They were so proud when I got my letter. They didn’t think I—I mean…what house do you want to belong to?”

“House?”

Confidence restored, Imogen ticked them off on her fingers. “Gryffindors are known for their courage. Hufflepuffs are caring; Ravenclaws are smart. Slytherins are…successful, I guess?”

“That Malfoy boy is in Slythy-whatsit?” 

Imogen nodded. 

“I don’t think I want to be in that.”

“My parents were Slytherins,” she said, but before Finn had a chance to backpedal, she shook her head. “You don’t have to apologize. I don’t want to be in Slytherin either.”

Finn eyed her, trying to get a read on her character. “What house do you want, then?”

She shrugged. “Gryffindor is the place to be right now, they say. There’s this boy in second year—The Boy Who Lived, they call him. He’s a Gryffindor.”

“Lived through what?”

“Long story,” she said. Then she pursed her lips. “I didn’t see him get on the train, actually. I thought I watched everyone. But anyway, I don’t think it’s such a good idea to want to be a Gryffindor just because he is: why would anyone want to compete for attention day in and day out with a celebrity? It’s bad enough we’re in the same _school_.”

“I bet you’re Ravenclaw,” Finn said.

Her eyes flashed at him. “Because all Asians are smart?” she snapped.

He blinked at her. “Because _you’re_ smart.”

“Oh,” she said, sitting back. “Thanks.”

“I’ll probably fail out on the first day,” Finn said dismally. “I don’t know anything. I mean, I know we’re supposed to go there to learn, but I don’t know _anything_ anything.”

Imogen sat up. “Well, we have a whole day on a train with nothing else to do. What do you want to know?”


	2. Chapter 2

By the time the Hogwarts Express pulled into the station, Finn had a working knowledge of the Wizarding education system, the recent history of Wizard-Muggle relations, and the story of He Who Must Not Be Named. Finn had gotten Imogen to name him once, under her breath, but he’d already forgotten the word, so he didn’t know why he’d bothered. Still, as he piled into boats with the rest of the first-year students, he was feeling distinctly less queasy than when he’d piled onto the train with them.

That is, he was until the boats rounded the bend in the lake and Finn got his first look at Hogwarts. It was a mildewed ruin with half the roof gone, and signs—visible even from a distance—placed at intervals along the fence reading “Danger: Do Not Enter, Unsafe.”

Finn would have been certain it was a practical joke if he hadn’t heard the other students simultaneously let out a collective exclamation of wonder. He took his glasses off and polished them on his robes, then looked again. Still a ruin. Furtively he glanced at Imogen. She, too, was looking up with her mouth open and the moon gleaming in her eyes. This was not good.

The boats pulled under a derelict underground dock—it looked like it must open into the ruin’s cellars. Finn clambered onto the dock after Imogen and tried not to look panicky.

“Welcome, First-Years, welcome,” came a voice from the other end of the dock. A pointed hat began to make its way through the crowd, nodding and bobbing as the witch underneath it greeted the students she passed.

“All present and accounted for, I trust, Hagrid?” she said when she neared the water.

“Counted ‘em meself, Professor Sprout,” Hagrid replied.

Imogen had told Finn about the Hogwarts gamekeeper, so he hadn’t said anything embarrassing when he saw the massive form waiting to take them to the boats, but he still jumped to hear the big booming voice right behind him.

“That way, First-Years,” Professor Sprout said, waving the children in the direction she’d come from. “Professor McGonagall is waiting to take you upstairs.”

As the students shuffled off, Finn finally got a glimpse of the witch under the hat: she was smiling and round, and not a great deal taller than the first-years, which is why he hadn’t been able to see her before. But now she was standing right in front of him, her eyes twinkling from under her broad hat-brim.

“Mr. O’Flaherty, am I right?” she said.

Finn pried his mouth open. “That’s me,” he agreed.

“A hearty welcome to you, Mr. O’Flaherty. I shall look forward to seeing _you_ in class.” And as she said “you,” she tapped him smartly on the head with her wand.

Finn shuddered at the feeling of an egg being broken over his hair and running down his neck into his shirt. But when the feeling passed, he looked up and saw—not the ramshackle cellar dock he thought he was in—but a stone archway elegantly carved and warmly lit with smoking torches. A yellow glow spilled out of the open door where a tall witch in green was ushering the students up the stairs.

“What are you waiting for?” Imogen asked him, plucking at the sleeves of his robe. “We don’t want to be late for the Sorting.”

When the first-years entered the Great Hall, Finn couldn’t tell what was open wider: their eyes or their mouths. If the others had ever seen a ceiling that looked like a starry night sky, he wouldn’t know it from their awe-stricken faces. Only when he wrenched his eyes away and looked down at the rows upon rows of black-robed students staring at the newcomers did Finn crash back down to earth. He hated being the center of attention, even at his normal school. The first-years shuffled along down the center aisle until they stood in a line at the very front of the hall. Next to a stool right in front of the dais stood the intimidating witch in green robes, and on the stool sat the most dilapidated hat Finn had ever seen. He wondered for a moment whether the hat was bewitched to look ratty the way the castle was bewitched to look like a ruin, but a glance at the other students told him the truth: it really was a manky old hat.

The green witch instructed them to come forward and put on the hat one at a time, then she shook out a scroll of parchment and began to read names.

“I hope I’m in Gryffindor,” chirped a voice beside Finn. He turned to see a large-eyed boy with a camera around his neck.

“Colin Creevy,” he said, sticking out his hand and shaking Finn’s with far more energy than was necessary. “This is brilliant, isn’t it? I can’t wait to meet Harry Potter. I wonder if he’s here.” He craned his neck above the other first-years to get a look at the older students seated at their house tables.

“Finn, Finn,” Imogen hissed at his elbow. “That’s you!”

Finn turned back to the front and saw Professor McGonagall staring at him with her lips set in an impatient line. He stumbled forward and climbed unsteadily onto the stool. She dropped the hat onto his head and it sank down over his eyes.

“Ah,” he heard it whisper into his ear, and he nearly fell off the stool. “It’s you, is it? I’ll have you know, I nearly had it out with Dumbledore over you. Muggles and Squibs, honestly. I’ll have you know the last time someone tried this I sent him straight back home—never Sorted that sort, if you catch my meaning. I’m all for equal opportunity, but what do you expect to accomplish here, really?”

The hat seemed to be waiting for an answer, but Finn’s brain just buzzed like a bee trapped in his skull. He had been right all along: he _was_ a Muggle. (Or a Squib? What was a Squib?) The Sorting Hat didn’t want him here. He didn’t belong at Hogwarts.

“Well, I give you credit for not making excuses,” the hat sighed. “Very well, loath as I am to do it…HUFFLEPUFF!”

The last word was shouted aloud, and one of the tables burst into applause. McGonagall plucked the hat from Finn’s head and he slid off the stool. Willing his knees not to buckle, he ducked back into the group of remaining first-years and made his way to the Hufflepuff table, his face so red his freckles disappeared. A tall, handsome boy clapped him on the back as he sat down and introduced himself as Cedric. 

Finn barely heard him. He barely saw Imogen squirming for a long time on the stool before the hat shouted, “RAVENCLAW!” He didn’t taste a bite of the excellent feast that materialized in front of them after the Sorting was finished. (“Could you pass the Muggle and Squib?” someone asked him. “The what?” he gaped. “The bubble and squeak,” the student repeated.) He didn’t hear the prefect’s instructions for which barrel to tap to get into the Hufflepuff common room; he barely registered the round, badger-themed room behind the barrel or the warm, comfortable bed they put him in for the night.

He was a Muggle. At a school for witchcraft and wizardry.


	3. Chapter 3

Finn didn’t expect to sleep, of course, but at some point he must have drifted off, because the next thing he knew, someone was shaking his shoulder, telling him it was time for breakfast. He rolled out of the bed, stuffed his arms numbly into his robe, and followed his roommates out to the Great Hall. 

As a pot of tea appeared on the table in front of him, Finn looked dismally at his distorted reflection in a spoon. He might as well eat a half-decent breakfast before they figured out the truth and sent him home in disgrace. He hadn’t wanted to come here in the first place, but being humiliated wasn’t exactly the way he would have chosen to leave.

He managed to get down a slice of toast and a glass of milk before he couldn’t take any more of the excited chatter of the Hufflepuffs around him. He climbed off the bench and slipped out into the corridor for some quiet.

To his surprise, he found Imogen there, sitting in the shadow of one of Hogwarts’s 142 staircases, looking nearly as miserable as he felt.

“Nervous for the first day of classes?” he asked, sitting down beside her and wrapping his arms around his knees.

“No,” she snapped, but then she sighed. “Yes. A little.”

“I’m sure you’ll do great,” Finn said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. “You’re in Ravenclaw. School should be right up your alley.”

She gave him a wan smile. “You’re sweet, Finn.” They sat in silence for a moment, and then she put her hand into a pocket of her robe and drew out a slender wand. She turned it over in her fingers.

“That looks nice,” Finn observed, feeling he should say something.

“It was my grandmother’s,” Imogen said. “She left it to me when she died—I was a baby at the time. It’s just willow and Kneadle whisker—nothing special. But my parents thought…well, they said it would be a tribute to my grandma if I used her wand instead of getting a new one from Olivander’s.”

“What’s Olivander’s?”

“The wand-maker? Do you have a different wand-maker in Ireland or something?”

“Uhh, I don’t know.”

“Well, where did you get all your school things?”

Finn huffed. “All over the place. Do you know how many used bookstores we had to go to just to find all those crazy textbooks? For a while I didn’t think we were going to be able to get _One Thousand Magical Herbs_ at all—Da had to go all the way to Cork for it in the end. And we had to go to a fancy dress shop for my robes. It was embarrassing, really.”

“Why didn’t you just go to Diagon Alley?”

“What’s Diagonally?”

Imogen gaped at him. “No one told you about Diagon Alley?”

“Obviously not.”

She sat up very straight. “Wait a minute. Where did you get your wand?”

Finn pulled it out of his robes. “My da made it for me. It’s not as nice as yours, but I reckon it’ll do.” He flourished it around like he’d seen other first-years doing at breakfast.

Imogen took it from him. “What’s it made of?”

“Oak, I think. From the tree in the back garden.”

“And its core?”

“What do you mean, core? More oak, I guess.”

Imogen’s eyes grew very wide. “Finn, this isn’t a real wand. It’s just a stick of wood!”

“Aren’t wands just sticks of wood?”

“No! What are you going to do? You can’t pass your classes without a wand.”

Finn slumped back, unable to catch her urgency. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“Of course it matters!”

“No, it really doesn’t.” He looked at her, weighing the benefits and the risks of telling her. Then he realized that didn’t matter either: everyone would know by the end of the day. “I’m not a wizard,” he said. 

“Of course you are.”

“No, I’m not trying to get you to encourage me. I’m not a wizard: I’m a Muggle. The Sorting Hat said so last night, though I knew it even before that.”

Imogen’s gaze wandered away as she replayed the night’s events. “The castle. You couldn’t see it: I thought something was wrong from your face.”

“So you see, it doesn’t really matter that I haven’t got a proper wand. They’ll be sending me home by tonight anyway.”

Imogen was silent for a moment. Then a strange light kindled in her eyes. “Why should they?”

“What do you mean, why should they? Haven’t you been listening? I’m a Muggle!”

“Do you want to go home?”

“No—well, that is, I thought I did, but now that I’m here….”

“Then I’m going to help you stay.”

Finn stared at Imogen in amazement. “Why?”

“Because if you can stay, then maybe there’s hope for…. I mean, what gives me more of a right to be here than you?” Finn thought she was blushing a little.

“That’s awfully decent of you,” he said.

She looked around. “You haven’t told anyone about this yet, have you?”

“Who would I have told?”

“Good.” She grabbed his wand in both fists and snapped it over her knee.

“Hey!” Finn cried.

“Just wait,” she said. She reached into another pocket and drew out a roll of something. “Spell-o tape,” she explained, and proceeded to wrap it around the break in his wand. “I saw a second-year doing this at the Gryffindor table. He tried to turn a jug into a pineapple and it only squirted him with orange juice.” She handed him back the wand, which was now sadly bent in the middle where the tape held it together. “Now no one will ask questions when it doesn’t work. Tell them it’s oak with…phoenix feather.”

“Phoenix?”

“They’ll expect you to get a new wand over the summer, but we’ll figure that out when we get there.”

“ _If_ we get there.”

She clapped him on the shoulder and stood up. “If I can make it, you can make it. And you know what?”

“What?”

She grinned. “I wasn’t sure before, but I think I can make it now.”

Finn got up and returned her smile, though he couldn’t figure out why she would doubt herself. Maybe it came from having parents who expected too much. “You really are a Ravenclaw,” he said.

Her smile faltered a little. “I sure hope so. Come on. You’ve got Charms and I’ve got Transfiguration and neither of us knows how to get there.”

Finn didn’t have much to do in Charms: he practiced the “swish and flick” with the rest of the students and dutifully mouthed the words “Wingardium leviosa,” but when it came to floating a real feather, he was excused from activity by a sad-faced Professor Flitwick.

“Really, Mr. O’Flaherty,” the little wizard said disappointedly, “breaking your wand on the first day!”

Transfiguration was the same story: while the other students tried valiantly (though in vain) to turn their matches into needles, Professor McGonagall suggested that Finn read ahead in Adalbert Waffling’s book on theory. 

“School isn’t all wand-work, Mr. O’Flaherty,” she said, handing back his Spell-o-taped stick. “I give half a dozen written examinations, you know: if you stick to your books, you may even pass my class.”

Considering how she intimidated the first-years in general, Finn was surprised at how kindly she said it. He could have sworn she almost smiled at him.

The first real trouble Finn ran into was at lunchtime, and it was the same sort of trouble a bunch of other first-year students were having: they couldn’t find their way back to the Great Hall.

“Poor babies,” Draco Malfoy said, leaning over a rail on the landing to watch them blundering from doorway to doorway. “The Great Hall is that way.” He pointed right with his left hand and left with is right hand, and Crabbe and Goyle worked themselves up to laughter as the first-years split up in confusion.

In the end, Finn discovered the Quidditch pitch but missed lunch entirely. He was more disappointed at missing the opportunity to confer with Imogen about the morning than he was about missing the meal. He only just found the History of Magic room before class began.

Only class didn’t begin. The students settled in and took out their quills, but no teacher appeared. After a few minutes, the others started scratching away at their parchment, but Finn couldn’t see what anyone was writing. He sat in perplexity for a long while, and then resigned himself to doodling recipes for apple tart until the others put their quills away and moved on to Defense Against the Dark Arts.

“O’Flaherty,” said the lavender-clad wizard at the front of the room, looking up from his roster.

“Here, sir,” Finn said, raising his hand shyly from the back of the classroom. 

“Any relation to Millicent O’Flaherty, rumored to be the second-greatest werewolf hunter in modern times?” He paused to twinkle at a girl in the front row. “Second after me, that is.”

“I don’t think so, sir,” said Finn.

“Pity,” said Professor Lockhart. “You might have inherited her talent.” He looked Finn up and down again. “Though I don’t know how well you’d photograph. Now, Miss…Cunningham, would you be so kind as to pass out these short quizzes?”

Finn looked down the first several pages when he received his quiz. “What is Gilderoy Lockhart’s favorite color?” he read under his breath. “When is Gilderoy Lockhart’s birthday, and what would his ideal gift be?” He looked back up at the teacher, who leaned back in his chair smiling benevolently at the class as they began to work. Not a few of them were looking as incredulous as Finn felt. Maybe he wouldn’t be the only one failing this quiz.

Finn spent the intervening hours between the end of classes and dinner drying out in the gardens because he had tapped the wrong barrel trying to get into the Hufflepuff common room and had been sprayed with vinegar. When dinnertime finally arrived, Finn lucked onto the right corridor and found himself in the Great Hall. Surviving the first day of classes and missing lunch had restored his proper appetite, and he dug into a steak and kidney pie with enthusiasm. Immediately after pudding, though, he left the Hufflepuff table and went in search of Imogen. He found her just breaking off from a group of Ravenclaw first-years.

“Why do you smell like vinegar?” she asked when he approached.

“Never mind,” he said. “How was your first day?”

“I’m more interested in hearing about yours,” she said, leading him to their secluded spot beside the staircase.

“Well, the broken wand got me through Charms and Transfiguration,” Finn said. “And I don’t think Professor Lockhart liked me very much, but I’m not sure I like him either.”

Imogen wrinkled her nose. “As soon as he saw my name, he asked me if I wanted any advice about following in the footsteps of great witches and wizards,” she said. “Then he said I’d photograph well. What does that even mean? Anyway, I figure as long as we read his horrid books, we’ll get through that class easily enough.”

“What’s the deal with History of Magic, though?” Finn asked. “Why wasn’t there a teacher?”

Imogen looked puzzled. “Didn’t Professor Binns show up?”

“No.”

The light of realization dawned on her. “He’s a ghost! Muggles can’t see ghosts!”

“Or hear them, I suppose,” Finn added. “How am I supposed to pass a class if I can’t hear the lectures?”

“You can use my notes,” Imogen said quickly. “I’m really good at taking them—see?” She reached into her capacious school bad and pulled out a scroll of densely written but very legible notes. “And I memorize them pretty fast, so you can just keep them after.”

“Wow,” Finn said. “Thank you.” Then he sighed. “Class is going to be pretty boring, though, isn’t it?”

She grinned. “Not much more boring than if you could hear him.”

“Really, though, how were your classes?” Finn said. “You seemed so nervous this morning.”

“Oh, well, you know. First day and all.”

“Did you get your feather to float?”

Again she flushed just as she had that morning. “No. I mean, not many people did.”

“Then it’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” Finn said. “Someone in my class caught his on fire!”

She shook her head, her face still red. “I’m a Yang. People have expectations.”

“Well then,” Finn said, “let’s practice. I mean, _you_ can practice. It wouldn’t make any difference for me.”

“No, that’s all right.”

“No, really,” he pressed. “We’ve got an hour before we have to be back in our common rooms. Go ahead and practice for a bit. Here’s my feather.” He drew the bedraggled plume out of the bottom of his bag.

“No, it’s okay.”

“Come on, just try.”

“No!” she snapped.

Finn fell back as though she had slapped him. “I’m…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean….”

But suddenly Imogen was crying, her face buried in her arms as she sobbed into her knees. 

Finn reached out and touched her shoulder tentatively. “It’s okay, Imogen,” he said. “Everyone has to start somewhere, right?” He laughed a little. “Look at it this way: you can’t be as bad as me.”

“Don’t count on it,” she said, her voice muffled by her robes.

“What do you mean?”

Sniffling, Imogen raised her head and drew out her wand. “Wingardium leviosa,” she said, and swished at the feather.

A single sad spark fell from the tip of the wand and died on the stone floor.

“I’m a Squib,” she said, and burst into a fresh torrent of tears.

That word again. Finn returned to patting her shoulder. “It can’t be all bad, can it?”

“It can and it is! I can’t do magic. I can’t do magic and I can’t ever learn to.” She sobbed again and covered her face with her sleeves. “I don’t belong here.”

Finn slumped back against the wall of the stair case. “Oh.”

“My parents thought maybe they were wrong about me,” she said, trying to dry her eyes even though she was still crying. “When I got my letter, they thought maybe I was a witch after all. A late bloomer, my mom said. But still they gave me my grandmother’s wand instead of taking me to see Olivander—because he’d know. And deep down, they know. And I know. I don’t know why I thought I could hide it. I know the truth, and soon the whole school will know it too.” She gave up mopping her face and abandoned herself to more tears.

Finn sat up. “Why should they?”

She sniffled. “What?”

“Why should they know?” he repeated. “If I can fake it, why can’t you?” When she just stared at him, he plowed on. “Professor McGonagall said I could pass Transfiguration just on the written tests, and History of Magic is _all_ written stuff. And Defense Against the Dark Arts—well, you already said that class is going to be a joke.”

“What about Charms?” Imogen was drying her face again, but she was now making some headway against the flow of tears.

“We can fail one class, can’t we?”

Imogen pulled her schedule out of her bag to consult it. “Astronomy should be okay—that’s all chart reading. And Herbology too: even a Squib can water a venomous tentacula.” 

“And Potions?” Finn asked, reading the schedule over her shoulder. “Hey, we have that together!”

The light was coming back into Imogen’s teary eyes. “Then we’ll figure it out together. Finn, I think…I think maybe we can make this work!” But her face dimmed when she looked back down at the wand she had dropped onto the floor. “How am I going to hide the fact that I can’t do anything with my wand, though? I can’t pretend to break mine too. It would be too obvious.”

“But you _can_ do something,” Finn said. “You can make it spark. Do you think you could, you know, get a few more out at a time?”

Imogen picked up her wand, squeezed it hard, and gave it a shake. Three sparks arced lazily to the ground. “I’ll work on it,” she said. “Better to look like I have no talent than to look like I have no magic.” She sighed.

Finn patted her on the shoulder again. “I’ll tell you what my father always said when my little brother Sean got down about being bad at maths.”

“What did he say?”

“He’d say, ‘You know what they call the person at the bottom of the class in medical school? _Doctor_.’”

Imogen thought about that. “But I’m a Ravenclaw. We’re supposed to be good at school.”

“No, you’re supposed to be smart. And it’s going to take all the brains we’ve got to get through magic school without magic!”

To his surprise, Imogen laughed. “I’m glad I know you, Finn O’Flaherty. Let’s get back to our common rooms: we have a lot of work to do.”


	4. Chapter 4

Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw had double Potions the next morning. The second Finn walked into the dungeon and saw Professor Snape standing at the front of the room with his arms folded into his cloak like a bat folding its wings, he knew he was in trouble.

“Your first task,” Snape said after an intimidating introductory lecture, “will be to produce the cure for boils found on page sixteen of _Magical Drafts and Potions_. You will work in pairs, and you will find the necessary ingredients in the cupboard at the back of the room. You have one hour.”

Finn and Imogen paired up like dust motes drawn together by static. “Can you light a fire?” Finn asked, glancing toward the wand Imogen clutched in her fist. She gave an uncertain nod. “I’ll go get the ingredients.”

He left her jabbing sparks into the kindling under their cauldron and joined the cue of students lined up to raid the supply cupboard. He was nearly the last in the group, so he had plenty of time to read the list of bizarre ingredients. Dried nettles, snake fangs, horned slugs (alive or dead? he wondered), porcupine quills. When he was left alone at the cupboard, he found three open bottles of dried nettles. He sniffed each and selected the one with the most potent scent: fresher, he guessed. He discovered to his relief that the horned slugs were pickled and not alive, and he took the jar with the clearest liquid: the slugs hadn’t been jostled into jelly in that one. 

When he returned to the table, Imogen proudly displayed the bright yellow flame she had going under the cauldron. It quickly brought the water to a boil, and they began to add ingredients.

“Two ounces of nettles,” she murmured, dropping them onto the scale a few stems at a time.

“Don’t you want to look at the book?” Finn asked her, counting out half a dozen snake fangs.

She tapped her temple. “Got it all in here. I told you I was good at memorizing things.”

“I think you should chop those first,” Finn said a few minutes later when Imogen went to add the slugs.

“The book doesn’t say to,” she pointed out.

“I know, but the point is to boil them down to a glue-like consistency, right? They’ll boil down faster if they’re in smaller pieces.”

Imogen bit her lip doubtfully. “You think so?”

“Tomatoes do,” he shrugged. When she raised her eyebrow, he said, “I cook.”

Imogen chopped the slugs.

They were just adding the porcupine quills when Professor Snape swept up from behind them. “O’Flaherty and Yang,” he observed. “Finished already?”

“Yes, sir,” they said together.

Snape leaned over the cauldron and sniffed the steam rising from it. He looked up suspiciously. “Has someone helped you with this?”

“No, sir,” Finn said in surprise.

“Confident, are you?”

“It wasn’t that complicated, sir.”

Snape’s lip curled in a sneer. “Then you won’t mind if I try it out on you?”

“No, sir,” Finn said stoutly, but he swallowed hard.

Snape seized Finn’s arm and tapped it with his wand. A large, ugly red boil rose up from his freckled skin and Finn stared at it in amazement. Then Snape drew up an eyedropper full of potion from the cauldron and let three drops fall onto the boil. It began to hiss and smoke, and in half a minute, Finn’s arm was back to its normal shape and color. Not a mark remained.

Snape looked torn between approval and disappointment. “Acceptable, Mr. O’Flaherty. There may be hope for a Hufflepuff in this class yet.” And he swept off to torment a pair whose cauldron had begun to emit a high-pitched squeal.

Imogen looked at Finn with wide eyes. “He was impressed by you!”

“By us.”

She shook her head. “That was all you, Finn.”

He shrugged, pleased despite himself. “I cook,” he said again.

The next morning Finn hardly had time to wish Imogen good luck in classes: she spent all of breakfast sitting at the Ravenclaw table mouthing spells she had memorized. To be fair, this did not seem to be an unusual hobby of Ravenclaws. Finn had more difficulty paying attention to the Charms textbook in his lap while simultaneously fielding inquiries and comments from the friendly Hufflepuffs. He had only just convinced himself he knew the two charms they had been expected to learn for this morning when the student body rose almost as one and began filing out of the Great Hall for class.

As he shuffled off to the Charms corridor, Finn spotted a thin, black-haired boy lurking in the shadow of a doorway. Approaching that doorway was the hyper little first-year Finn had met at the Sorting. Colin Creevy was holding a large photograph in one hand and a quill in the other, and he was obviously looking for someone.

Seconds before Colin would charge past the doorway where Harry Potter was hiding, Finn spotted Draco Malfoy, flanked as always by Crabbe and Goyle, leaning on the bannister halfway up a neighboring staircase. They hadn’t spotted Colin or Harry yet, but Finn could guess what would happen if the Slytherins caught the first-year begging for an autograph. 

“Can I help, Colin?” Finn asked, hurrying forward and catching the boy’s elbow just before he passed the doorway.

“Have you seen Harry?” Colin chirped. “I just had this developed!” He turned the photograph so that Finn could see a blur of black hair and black robes just disappearing behind a stone column, leaving nothing in the image but a desk and a knocked-over stool.

“It’s not very good,” Colin admitted. “I only just caught him as he left—he must not have heard me asking him to stay still. But if you watch long enough, sometimes he peaks back out from the column there. Reckon he’ll sign it for me?”

Finn began to lead Colin away from the doorway. “I don’t know, Colin,” he said. When the smaller boy looked crestfallen, he quickly added, “I’m sure he’d like to, but, you know—if he signed your picture, everyone would want one. He can’t look like he’s showing favoritism to his friends.”

Colin lit up like a firefly at being categorized among Harry Potter’s friends. “You’re right, Finn. Besides, it’s not a very good picture. I’ll wait until I can get a better one.”

That wasn’t exactly the conclusion Finn wanted Colin to draw, but it achieved his purposes for the moment. He patted the smaller boy on the shoulder as he trotted off to class, then returned in the direction he’d come to get to Charms.

“Thanks, mate,” Harry said as Finn passed his hiding place. “I owe you one.”

Finn flushed a little. “It was nothing. I’m Finn, by the way.”

Harry stuck out his hand. “Well, Finn, it was nice of you. You’re a true Hufflepuff.”

The flush deepened. “I hope so,” he said.


	5. Chapter 5

Finn wondered what Imogen would say about his encounter with the Boy Who Lived, but he didn’t get to tell her about it. She didn’t come to lunch, and it wasn’t until after dinner that he found her in their spot behind the staircase, curled up with her arms around her knees like an angry pill bug.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her.

“They know,” she said.

Finn couldn’t tell whether she was about to burst into tears or throw a tantrum. “Who does?”

“The other Ravenclaws. They know I’m a Squib. Didn’t Professor Flitwick make you float feathers in class today, one at a time?”

“Yeah. Nothing happened to mine, of course. But Professor Flitwick said my wrist action showed real promise.”

“Well, nothing happened to mine either,” Imogen said through gritted teeth. “And then Luna Lovegood just says out of the blue, ‘I didn’t know Squibs were allowed at Hogwarts.’”

“She didn’t,” Finn gasped.

Imogen nodded. “The awful thing is, I don’t think she even know it was a nasty thing to say. It was like it just popped out, like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know it was supposed to rain today.’ She’d been nice up to then.”

“But it’s only the second Charms class,” Finn pointed out. “How can you tell a Squib from a kid who doesn’t know what they’re doing after only two days?”

“That’s what Professor Flitwick said, but Luna—she’s weird, dreamy. It’s like she doesn’t notice any of the normal things, but she notices what everyone else ignores. She was going on about invisible Nargles before class, whatever those are.”

“Do you think she’ll bring it up again?”

Imogen considered. “Actually, she seemed to forget she’d said it by the end of the period. But that’s not the point. The point is, I can’t fake it. It was stupid of me to try.”

“Want me to break your wand?” Finn offered half-heartedly.

“No, I told you that would be too obvious. Besides, everybody knows my family could just buy me a new one right away, not like—”

Finn smiled a little. “Not like me, a poor Irish kid with too many siblings and used textbooks.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“No, it’s all right. I’m not embarrassed by it: I _am_ a poor Irish kid with too many siblings and used textbooks. And in this case,” he added, brandishing his Spell-o taped wand, “it clearly works in my favor. I’ve got until next September before I have to worry about explaining why my wand doesn’t work.”

“Which is about 363 days longer than I have,” Imogen said glumly.

“You know what we need?” Finn said. “Hot cocoa. It always makes me feel better.”

Imogen smiled without conviction, but she got up anyway and followed him down the stairs.

“Am I allowed in your common room?” she asked.

“We’re not going to my common room,” he said. “The kitchens are this way too. I haven’t been in them yet, but I figure we can probably find someone doing the washing up from supper who’s willing to let us into the pantry.”

He stopped at a large painting of a bowl of fruit. “Yesterday when I was locked out of the common room,” he explained, “I saw this tall, skinny redhead boy stop here and dust the painting with a quill feather. A handle popped out and he went inside. When he came back out, he had an armful of sweets.”

“Dust the painting?” Imogen repeated.

Finn shrugged his shoulders and drew a quill out of his bag. He set to work, brushing away at the painting with the feathered end. He was at it for several minutes before a pear suddenly gave a giggle and turned into a handle.

“Not dust—tickle!” Imogen said, and she almost laughed.

Finn opened the door and waved her through.

Inside, the kitchen proved to be a cavernous room laid out just like the Great Hall directly above it, only instead of being lined with banners and tall windows, it was banked floor to ceiling with gleaming pots and pans, and on one wall there was a giant brick fireplace. And bustling back and forth from fireplace to table, levitating stacks of dishes in front of them, was a crowd of the strangest creatures Finn had ever met—though of course, he hadn’t yet met anything very strange at all.

“What are they?” he asked Imogen.

“House elves,” she said. “I didn’t know Hogwarts had any. Though of course it makes sense—so many students to feed and all that.”

“What’s a house elf?” Finn asked.

“That’s a house elf,” she replied, pointing to one hurrying toward them under a pile of plates. “They serve the house they belong to until they die, or until their master gives them clothes. That means their sacked.”

“They’re slaves?”

Imogen pursed her lips. “I’ve never thought of them that way, but yes, I guess they sort of are.”

“Doesn’t sound like there’s any ‘sort of’ about it,” Finn said, but their conversation was interrupted by a squeak from the plate-laden house elf.

“Lolly did not see you!” she cried, waving her hand and sending the plates in a neat cascade onto the table, where they restacked themselves with little clinking sounds. “Can Lolly bring you something to eat? Toffee? Cauldron cakes?”

Now that she was no longer obscured by the pillar of dishes, Finn could see her bat-like ears and blue eyes the size of tennis balls. She wore a canvas shopping bag with the bottom cut open; it hung from her shoulders by the handles and was tied neatly at the waist with a length of ribbon. It was comely in its own way, like a homemade doll’s dress, but “Derby’s Dry Goods” was still legible under the ribbon.

“Erm, no, thank you,” Finn said. “If you can just point us to the pantry, I was going to make some hot cocoa if that’s all right.”

Lolly lit up. “Oh, Lolly’s hot cocoa is famous, sir! Sit down and she will make you some!”

Finn tried to protest, but the little elf inexorably ushered the two of them down the hall to the hearth, where she seated them on two elf-height stools before bustling off to make the cocoa.

“She doesn’t need to do this,” Finn said to Imogen. 

“It would insult her if we refused,” Imogen said. “Serving is what house elves do. It makes them happy.”

Finn stared at her. “Are you seriously telling me that your slaves like to be slaves?”

“They’re not _my_ slaves,” Imogen pointed out. “But they _are_ happy: you can ask them.”

“As though they’d admit they weren’t in front of people like us,” Finn growled.

“You’re awfully tetchy about this. You’ve been in the wizarding world for all of five minutes and already you’re all high and mighty about the way we do things.”

“Forgive me if an Irishman is a little sore on the subject of oppression,” he snapped.

Imogen drew herself up. “Don’t talk to me about oppression. I’m from Hong Kong. It’s not like we _asked_ to get traded back and forth between Britain and China.”

At this point Lolly returned with a tray bearing two pewter mugs and a steaming pot of cocoa. She set it on the hearth and poured a mug for each of them.

“I’m Finn O’Flaherty, by the way,” he said as he thanked her for the cocoa. “And this is Imogen Yang.”

Lolly curtsied politely. “Lolly is very glad to meet you. We don’t often know the students by name, oh no, we do not.”

“Why is that?” Finn asked, taking a sip. “Oh, Lolly, this is the best hot cocoa I’ve ever had!”

She flushed with pleasure and smiled shyly. “Thank you, sir.”

“Call me Finn.”

“Oh, no, Lolly could not!”

“Yes, Lolly can,” Finn said. “I won’t be called sir by anybody, least of all someone who’s clearly older than I am. How old are you anyway, Lolly?”

She considered. “Lolly is younger than her parents and older than her two little brothers, sir.”

“Finn.”

She flushed again. “Sir Finn.”

“I’m not a knight.”

Even her ears were red now.

“You’re embarrassing her,” Imogen hissed. “It really _is_ good cocoa, Lolly.”

“Thank you, miss.”

“Call her Imogen,” Finn said. When Lolly hesitated, Imogen shot him a look, but he shot it right back.

In the end she sighed. “Yes, please call me Imogen, Lolly.”

Lolly fidgeted and then seemed to find a compromise. “Finn O’Flaherty is too kind,” she said with another curtsy. “And so is Imogen Yang.”

Finn decided to be satisfied with that. “Would you like to join us?” he asked, waving at a third stool on the hearth. “Have some of your own cocoa.”

Lolly’s eyes grew even bigger than normal. “Lolly has never been asked to drink with a witch and a wizard!”

Now it was Finn who flushed. “I guess we’re not your typical witch and wizard.”

“You can say that again,” Imogen muttered into her mug.

Finn left his stool and found an earthenware mug on a shelf. Returning to the hearth, he poured a measure of cocoa and handed it to Lolly, who curtsied as she accepted it. Again he waved her to the stool, and she climbed onto it hesitantly, as though she was waiting for someone to pull it out from underneath her.

“It doesn’t seem like Dumbledore to enslave a whole gaggle of elves,” Finn observed once she was settled. “I mean, I haven’t ever talked to him or anything, but he always seems…kind. Like a skinny Santa Claus.” Imogen laughed.

“Oh, Dumbledore _is_ kind,” Lolly said. “He gives us one whole day off every month!”

“Only one day?” Finn gaped.

Lolly leaned forward. “When he became headmaster, he tried to give us one day every week, but we refused. Never had we been so insulted!” Her eyes grew wide again. “And do you know what he did? He apologized! A wizard, apologize to house elves!” She shook her head in wonder.

Finn shook his head too, but with a different kind of wonder. “Seems to me like the bar is set pretty low for wizards to come off as amazing,” he said. “But you’re magic, aren’t you? You were levitating those plates when we came in—and you don’t even have a wand.”

Lolly looked perplexed. “Why would a house elf need a wand?” She snapped her fingers and the empty cocoa pot suddenly leapt into the air and scoured itself, settling back down onto the tray gleaming.

Finn stared at it. “If you’re that magical, why do you put up with it? Why do you slave away in the kitchens when you could be out doing—I don’t know—whatever wizards do?” It just occurred to him that he had no idea what sort of jobs wizards had.

Lolly’s ears drooped. “It may be small work, sir, but is it wrong for Lolly to be proud of doing it well?”

Imogen gave Finn a hard look, but she didn’t need to. “I’m sorry, Lolly,” he said. “My parents are cooks. I’m a cook too, come to think of it. It isn’t small work: I’m sorry I said it was.”

“Please don’t apologize, Finn O’Flaherty,” Lolly said kindly.

“Isn’t that was I was trying to tell you before?” Imogen said to Finn.

“Not exactly,” Finn replied. “Being proud of your work isn’t the same thing as choosing it. Lolly, if you could be anything in the world, would you want to be a cook?”

Finn wondered if Lolly’s eyes would ever reach a point where they could open no wider. “Anything in the world?” she repeated. “Well, sir, I think Harley and Marley would want to be cooks.” She waved across the room where half a dozen elves were conferring over a custard; Finn couldn’t guess which ones were Harley and Marley.

“But what about you, personally?” he pressed.

Lolly swirled the contents of her mug as though she wanted to read the cocoa dregs like tea leaves. “Lolly doesn’t know what else there is to do,” she said at last.

“Neither do I, really,” Finn admitted. “I’m Muggle-born, you know. Until a few weeks ago, I didn’t know wizards existed, much less a school to train them.”

“Does Finn like school?” Lolly asked.

Finn glanced at Imogen and settled on a shrug. “There’s a lot to learn.”

“Lolly has never been to school,” she said quietly.

“Never? There’s no house elf school?”

“We learns on the job,” she explained. 

“Can you…read and everything?” Imogen asked. Finn wondered if this was the first conversation she’d ever had with an elf.

Lolly’s ears flapped as she nodded. “Lolly can read and write and do maths. Very important in the kitchen.” She pointed at the shelf of ancient-looking cookbooks on the mantle above them. “But Lolly doesn’t know anything else.”

“How would you like to come to school with us?” Finn asked suddenly.

Again with the amazingly wide eyes. “Come to school? Upstairs?”

“That’s where they keep the teachers,” Finn said. “I’m sure you’d like it.”

“Lolly couldn’t!” she cried. “House elves are not allowed.”

“Are you sure?”

To Finn’s surprise, Imogen spoke up. “I’m almost certain there’s no rule specifically against it,” she said. “I’ve read them all. I don’t remember seeing anything that said, ‘House elves are not allowed in class.’ And believe me: if I don’t remember it, it’s not there.”

“Lolly would be embarrassed barging in with the students all looking at her.”

“They don’t have to see you,” Finn said. “You can slip in right as class starts and sit in the back. I bet you’d even fit in our bags, if you don’t mind. We’ll swing by here after breakfast and pick you up.”

Lolly wavered. “But what would be the point?”

Finn shrugged. “If you learn a bit, you might find something you’d rather do than cooking. You don’t think Dumbledore would stop you if you wanted to go…I don’t know…be a cable repair elf or something?”

“What is cable?” Lolly asked.

“Never mind,” Finn said. “All I mean is, my parents sent me here so I would have more choices than just being a cook. Why shouldn’t it be the same for you?”

Lolly’s fingers worked nervously around the mug she was holding, but Finn thought there was excitement in them too. Suddenly she looked up at him. “Lolly could not steal learning,” she declared. “Lolly must trade something for it.”

“You already work in the kitchens,” Finn pointed out. “I think Hogwarts owes you.”

“Then Lolly would like to give Finn O’Flaherty and Imogen Yang something, for sharing their learning with her.”

Finn nodded: he understood what it was like not to want to be a charity case. “Tell you what. Imogen and I…we’re struggling a bit. With spells and things.” He indicated the gleaming pewter pot. “You wouldn’t have any trouble. If you help us out, we’ll all be even. How’s that?”

“We couldn’t do that, Finn,” Imogen said. “It would be cheating.”

“I don’t think so,” he replied. He invited her to lean forward so that he could whisper into her ear. “If we were a proper witch and wizard, it would be cheating—but we’re not. We can’t do what they’re asking us to do. And yet here we are. Is it cheating to find a way to succeed when it’s impossible to do it the way they want us to?”

Imogen considered this for a long moment. Finally she nodded. “They shouldn’t have sent us our letters if they didn’t want us to try to stay. What do you say, Lolly? The three of us against the world?”

Lolly suddenly beamed. “Finn O’Flaherty and Imogen Yang and Lolly,” she said.

“Great,” Finn said. “Class starts at nine.”


	6. Chapter 6

The next day was double Potions followed by double Herbology. As Finn had guessed, Lolly fit rather comfortably into Imogen’s bag, and not even Snape seemed to notice the globous blue eyes that occasionally rose above the level of the table as Finn and Imogen worked away on a spider bite remedy.

“Potions is just like cooking,” Lolly squeaked from the bag as Finn and Imogen walked down to the sunny greenhouses. Finn grinned.

Lolly seemed to find Herbology almost too interesting, and as the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws weeded a sulky patch of Devil’s Snare, Finn kept catching glimpses of a pair of bat-like ears bobbing up and down the rows of raised beds and pots.

“Lolly didn’t know there were so many plants,” she observed as they carried her back to the castle. “Lolly only knows the ones for eating. There are two hundred and fifty-three of those.”

They decided Lolly should go with Imogen for Charms and Transfiguration—not only because Finn’s bag wasn’t as comfortable for her but because Finn had his broken wand as an excuse, and Imogen was still afraid of the other Ravenclaws discovering her secret.

“How did it go?” Finn asked them when classes let out that afternoon.

“I don’t think it was as interesting for Lolly,” Imogen said. “She already knows how to do everything in Charms.”

“But not in Transfiguration,” Lolly pointed out. “All Lolly knows how to do is turn chickens into turkeys for the Christmas feast.”

“But she’s terrific in class,” Imogen added. “Professor Flitwick said I had one more chance to float my feather, and everyone was watching, and so I flicked my wand and said, ‘Wingardium leviosa,’ and Lolly made my feather float! He gave me a passing mark!”

“That’s brilliant!” Finn said.

But then Imogen turned back to the house elf. “Are you quite sure you don’t mind, Lolly? I hate taking the credit for your magic. It’s not fair to you.”

Lolly shook her head so that her ears flapped. “Lolly learned fifteen new magical herbs today, and she is going to learn how to turn matchsticks into needles. And tomorrow she is going to hear about Uric the Oddball in the History of Magic. Lolly doesn’t mind helping Imogen Yang float her feathers.”

“You’re a brick, Lolly,” Finn said. “You’ll enjoy that class more than I will, that’s for sure.”

“Why, Finn O’Flaherty?”

“Because Professor Binns is a ghost. I…I, erm, have trouble seeing him.”

“Because Finn O’Flaherty is a Muggle?”

Finn stared at her. “How did you know?”

Lolly looked confused. “Finn O’Flaherty is a Muggle and Imogen Yang is a…Squib.” (She said the word in a whisper, looking sympathetically at Imogen as she did.) “House elves always knows. But we doesn’t see them at Hogwarts usually, no we don’t.”

“There’s a reason for that,” Imogen said with an ironic smile.

“Will Finn O’Flaherty give Lolly his glasses?” Lolly asked.

“What for?” he asked, but he handed them over anyway.

Lolly took them, looked through the lenses (they magnified her already enormous eyes to comical proportions), then snapped her fingers and handed them back. “Try this, Finn O’Flaherty.”

Dubiously, Finn put the glasses back on, and immediately he caught his breath in astonishment. A gray, translucent man in a big ruff was floating down the staircase toward them, smiling benevolently and tipping his head—not his hat—as he caught sight of them.

“Hello, Sir Nick,” Imogen said, as though transparent, nearly-headless men always floated down staircases at her.

“You’re the Gryffindor ghost!” Finn gasped. He took his glasses off and Sir Nicholas disappeared. He stared at Lolly, who gestured for him to put them back on.

“…thought you were rather standoffish,” Sir Nick was saying. “I’ve only said hello to you four times this week.”

“I’m sorry, Sir Nicholas,” Finn said hastily. “I…must not have heard you.”

“Not to worry, not to worry,” the ghost said. “I do know how distracting the first days of school are. It’s been more than five hundred years since I was a first-year student, but I haven’t forgotten.” He looked wistfully off into the distance. “Well, well, carry on!” And he drifted away.

“It’s like magic,” Finn said, before he remembered it _was_ magic.

The house elf grinned. “And now Lolly must go help with dinner. See you tomorrow, Finn O’Flaherty and Imogen Yang!”

Thus began a happy interlude in the lives of three unconventional Hogwarts students. Finn learned to ride a broom and Imogen discovered she had a flare for Astronomy; Lolly was delighted by everything she learned, and Finn and Imogen learned a good bit from her as well. And with every day, Finn’s love of Hogwarts grew like Devil’s Snare.

Finn was more floating than walking down a second-floor corridor one rainy evening after Snape had—with obvious reluctance—awarded five points to Hufflepuff for the Beautification Potion he had produced in class, when Imogen blundered into him from a side passage.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, seeing her face.

“Filch,” she hissed. “I just got away from him. He’s in a foul mood and he’s coming this way. In here!” She grabbed his elbow and pulled him into an empty classroom.

“What did you do?” Finn asked, though he knew enough about Hogwarts at this point to know she didn’t have to have done anything at all.

“Nothing!” she said. “I was trying to be nice, actually. See, I think Filch is a Squib.”

“No way.” But then Finn thought about it: the only thing connected to Filch that had any whiff of magic about it was his preternaturally observant cat. Then a horrifying thought struck him. “You didn’t tell him you’re one too, did you?”

“Of course not,” Imogen said. “I just tried to make conversation with him. Told him I hoped he was recovering from his flu. Squibs have it hard in the wizarding world—I thought he might appreciate a friend.”

“And he didn’t,” Finn guessed.

She shook her head. “He’s just so jealous of students he can’t have a civil conversation.”

“I guess I sort of understand,” he said. “A Squib working at Hogwarts must be like a poor man working at Buckingham Palace. Surrounded by a life you can’t live and things you can’t have.”

Imogen smiled at him. “You know, it’s too bad Filch is so bitter: he’s missing the chance to be friends with people like you.”

“And you,” Finn pointed out.

At that moment, they heard querulous shouting from down the corridor, and they poked their heads out of the classroom to see Filch berating a small, black-haired student for tracking mud across the floor.

“That’s Harry Potter!” Imogen said.

The harangue continued for a minute longer, and then Filch dragged Harry off toward the stairs. Finn thought he heard the phrase “write you up.”

“He’s gone,” Finn said. “Come on.” He led Imogen out of the classroom. Almost immediately, they saw Sir Nicholas hurrying toward them.

“Oh, it’s Finn and Imogen,” he said when he saw them. “It’s an awful mess, I must say.”

“What happened?” Imogen asked.

“I’m afraid it’s rather my fault,” Sir Nick said. “I kept Harry in the corridor talking and now Filch is going to report him for the puddle he left on the floor. I wish there was something that could be done!”

Imogen was rubbing her chin. “Do you think if something even bigger happened, Filch might forget about Harry?”

“Bigger like what?” Nick asked.

“Bigger like Peeves,” she said, pointing up to where the devilish Poltergeist was zooming in and out of classrooms putting axel grease on the doorknobs.

Nick looked inspired. “Oh, I say. Yes, I think that would do it. But it will have to be bigger than slicking up the doorknobs, I’m afraid.”

“That big black cabinet on the third floor,” Finn said suddenly. “Isn’t it on the wall facing banister?”

“Yes,” Sir Nick said.

“What if it…fell _over_ the banister?”

“Great Scott, that should do it!” Nick cried. “I’ll go suggest it to Peeves. Shouldn’t take much convincing. You’re good eggs, both of you!” And off he flew.

Finn watched him go, then looked at the muddy footprints on the stone floor. He caught sight of a mop and bucket a little further down the corridor and made off toward them.

“What are you doing?” Imogen asked.

“Filch did just mop this place. No reason he should do it twice.” He pulled the mop out of the bucket.

Imogen hesitated a moment, then trotted over and—with some effort, as her arms were so skinny—picked up the bucket and followed Finn back to the muddy footprints.

As they began work, a terrific crash sounded below them, and Filch’s howl of outrage quickly followed.

Finn grinned at Imogen and continued mopping.


	7. Chapter 7

Considering he was a Muggle at a school for wizards, Finn thought things were going pretty well for him and his friends. That is, they were until Halloween.

He and Imogen lingered in the Great Hall after the tables had been relieved of the last pumpkin pasty, hoping perhaps Lolly might appear with a “pop!” to say hello once the other students had left. Instead, they were drawn from the Hall by the sound of raised voices. 

“You think the Weasley twins are in a fight with Marcus Flint again?” Imogen asked as they hurried with the other feast stragglers up the second floor.

“They sound scared, not angry,” Finn panted.

When they arrived in a corridor they very rarely visited, the first thing they noticed was a crowd of students and teachers gathered around a wall sconce with something hanging from it. The second thing they noticed was that their feet were getting wet.

“I can’t see anything,” Imogen said. She was shorter than Finn. 

So he began to elbow his way gently through the crowd, skirting the wall until at last they came near the front. He gasped.

Mrs. Norris was hanging from the sconce by her tail, stiff as a taxidermied hunting trophy. Behind her, the wall was covered in red lettering.

“Enemies of the Heir, beware,” a snide voice read loudly. “You’ll be next, Mudbloods!”

Draco didn’t get to say any more because at that moment, Filch arrived, followed closely by Dumbledore and the other teachers, and for a few moments there was nothing but chaos and shouting.

Finally, Dumbledore managed to corral Filch and several students (Finn didn’t see who) in one direction while the teachers began to move the rest of the crowd in the other.

“Prefects, lead your houses back to their common rooms,” Professor McGonagall said. “Don’t straggle, now.”

As Cedric Diggory gently but firmly herded the Hufflepuffs back toward the stairs, Imogen grabbed Finn’s wrist and held him back.

“What’s going on?” Finn whispered to her. “Who’s the Heir? And what’s a Mudblood?”

“Someone’s after the Muggle-borns,” she hissed.

“Why? What’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing, but some people” (she shot a glance at Draco) “think magic should be kept in all-magic families.”

“That’s just snobbery,” Finn snorted.

“I know, but listen: if the Heir of Slytherin has been found, Muggleborns aren’t going to be safe. And if Muggle- _borns_ aren’t safe, what do you think they’ll do to you if they find out what _you_ are, Finn?” Her eyes were wide and unblinking.

Finn’s stomach turned over.

“Come on, Finn,” Cedric called from the top of the stairs.

“Be careful, Imogen,” Finn said as he disentangled himself from her hand.

“Me? Why?”

He looked back at Mrs. Norris, still hanging upside down and twisting as sadly as a broken wind-chime. “Mrs. Norris belongs to Filch. If they attacked her first of all, they can’t be friendly to Squibs either.”

And then Imogen was swept away by a crowd of Ravenclaws. Finn watched her go, realizing that perhaps the wizarding world wasn’t exactly the place he’d thought it was.

“You look rather glum, Mr. O’Flaherty,” Professor Sprout said a few days later during double Herbology. “I hate to see a member of my house looking so dejected. What’s wrong?”

Finn dug his trowel into the dirt and left it there. He pushed his glasses back up his nose and looked at his teacher. Even though he was squatting on the ground, he didn’t have that far to look up. “How is Mrs. Norris?” he asked.

“Still Petrified, I’m afraid,” Professor Sprout said, getting on her knees and taking his trowel out of the ground. “But that’s better than being dead, isn’t it? You have to turn the soil over _this_ way—otherwise the roots never get through.”

Finn took back his trowel and started digging halfheartedly. “But you will be able to cure her?”

“As soon as the Mandrakes are mature,” she said. This announcement had been made to the students the day after the attack.

“What’s the Restorative Draught like?” Finn asked. “I was reading a bit about it last night.”

Professor Sprout smiled. “Yes, Professor Snape mentioned you’re quite a natural at Potions.”

“He did?”

“Well, not quite in those exact words,” she said, shifting awkwardly. “He may have said something like ‘intolerable show-off,’ but from Professor Snape, that means the same thing.”

That sounded more like it. Finn continued digging ineffectually. “Professor, I read that the Mandrakes are chopped up and boiled.”

“That they are,” Sprout said, “right after adding the lacewing flies and right before the unicorn hairs, if I recall.”

Finn pursed his lips. There were a lot of things he liked about the wizarding world, but after Halloween, he was discovering an increasing number of things he didn’t. “The Mandrakes are alive, though, right? Not like normal plants but—more like people. They get acne and throw parties—that’s what I read.”

“Well, O’Flaherty, in the wizarding world there are a number of plants that seem a lot less like plants and a lot more like people. Not like Muggle gardens, I imagine. It doesn’t mean they’re not plants.”

“But just because they’re plants doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have…I don’t know…rights and such. If they’re alive—I mean, really alive.”

Professor Sprout smiled. “You have a Hufflepuff heart,” she said affectionately. “But what would you have me do? Save the Mandrakes and let Mrs. Norris stay Petrified forever? There is no other cure for Petrification, Finn.”

“If…if there was a way to make the Draught without killing the Mandrakes, would you try it?”

Professor Sprout puffed out her cheeks. “Of course I would. I’m rather partial to the little blighters myself. But there _is_ no way to make the potion without killing the Mandrakes.”

“I’d like to try to find one,” Finn said.

“You? You’re a first-year, Mr. O’Flaherty.”

“But I’m Muggle-born,” he said, “and that means I see things differently. Maybe I’ll think of something wizards wouldn’t.”

She looked long at him, and finally a smile spread across her face. “I’ll give you the rest of the potion ingredients and a single Mandrake to work with,” she said. “I’m afraid I can’t spare any more. You must wear earmuffs if you ever take it out of its pot, mind you, and be warned that they bite as well as scream. But if you can find a way, Mr. O’Flaherty, I will make Professor Snape use it.”

Finn smiled at the thought of her bullying the Potions teacher. “Thank you, Professor.”


	8. Chapter 8

By mid-November, Finn had tried everything he could think of as a substitute for chopped Mandrake in the Restorative Draught: bits of its leaves, its navel lint, even its toenail clippings. The potion recipe said that the liquid, upon the addition of the Mandrake, should turn from sloppy brown to iridescent lilac, but the best he had managed was a muddy purple. His Mandrake, whom Imogen had nicknamed Drake-O, had recently hit a growth spurt and become very surly. Finn was running out of time.

He was wandering the corridor pondering the problem when he thought he might see if he could find Nearly Headless Nick. The ghost might remember some late medieval cure that could be updated for the twentieth century. Sir Nicholas was often to be found near the entrance to Gryffindor Tower, so Finn took a guess at which staircase would take him there and began trudging up.

Unfortunately, the staircase began to move while he was partway up, and by the time he reached the landing, he realized it had dropped him off in the second-floor corridor where Mrs. Norris had been Petrified.

He shuddered and was just turning to leave when he felt a heavy hand clap onto his shoulder from behind. 

“What are you doing up here, Mudblood?” Draco Malfoy snapped. “Looking to meet the Heir in person?”

Goyle (or was it Crabbe?) slowly turned Finn around to face the vampiric-looking second-year.

“I was just leaving,” Finn said lamely.

“Of course you were,” Draco replied. Then suddenly he whipped out his wand and cried, “ _Haesus fortissime_!”

Finn felt the spell hit him squarely in the face and he fell backwards, striking his head soundly on the stone floor. As his vision swam, Draco leaned over him with something in his hand, and suddenly Finn couldn’t see anything at all.

“Have fun playing blind man’s buff!” Draco laughed, and then Finn heard him and his two thugs run off down the stairs.

When his head stopped spinning, Finn opened his eyes and realized he could see little glimpses of the world out of the corner of each eye: it was only his glasses that were blacked out. Sighing with relief, he reached up to take them off, but they wouldn’t budge. He tugged harder. No, they were stuck on his face, like they’d been glued there.

Finn sat up and swallowed down the lump of panic that had risen in his throat. The best thing to do would be to get to the hospital wing: Mrs. Pomfrey would be able to un-stick his glasses. But which way was the hospital wing? He thought it was maybe on the first floor, so the first thing was to find the stairs. After that, maybe he’d stumble into someone who wasn’t a Slytherin who would take him the rest of the way.

Carefully, tipping his head from side to side to get glimpses of the floor, he got to his feet and managed to find the wall. Feeling his way with one hand, he headed in the direction he thought the stairs were, but after he had shuffled along for what felt like miles, he still hadn’t reached them. He must have gotten disoriented when he fell. He turned around and headed back the other way.

“Wow, Finn!” he heard someone squeak right in front of him. 

He leapt back with a shout of surprise, then collapsed against the wall in relief. “Colin. What are you doing up here?”

“Filch is at lunch,” Colin said. “He’s been keeping guard up here, did you know? I came to take a picture of the scene of the crime. To send to my dad. Did Draco do that to you?” Colin asked. “Was it magic? Do you think you remember the spell?”

“Yes, yes, and no,” Finn said a little impatiently. “I’ll tell you all about it later. Can you help me get to the hospital wing?”

“Sure!” Colin said. “I was going there after this to visit Harry. Did you see what happened to his arm at the Quidditch match? Just let me take a picture first.”

“The corridor will still be here when you get back,” Finn said.

“Not of that—of you!” Colin replied.

“No, Colin…”

“Hold still. I can get a better shot from the stairs. Just a little to the lef—oh!”

“What?” Finn demanded, alarmed by Colin’s gasp of surprise. He tilted his head, trying in vain to get a look at what was happening. He heard a thud and a clatter, and then the strangest swishing noise, like silk being drawn across sand. Something smooth and weighty brushed past his foot, and he leapt back in fear, but by the time he had angled his head enough to look down, whatever had been there was gone.

“Colin?” he called in a quavering voice. “Colin, is this a joke? Where are you?”

His searching hand found the wall again and he stumbled forward, wondering wildly if Colin was hiding from him. He shuffled along for a few yards until his hand found a doorframe. His other hand found the knob, and he pushed the door open.

“Colin?”

His voice echoed against tile: either he had found a second-floor indoor swimming pool, or he had blundered into a bathroom.

“Oooh, that looks nasty,” someone said delightedly.

Finn took a step backward. It was a girl’s voice. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t realize it was a girl’s bathroom.”

“That’s all right,” the girl said. “No one comes in here but me. Well, not many people.” The delight in her voice quickly turned morose. “No one wants to share a bathroom with mopey Moaning Myrtle.”

“Are you Moaning Myrtle, then? Erm, I’m Finn O’Flaherty.” He stuck out his hand and hoped it was in the right direction.

“Sure,” Myrtle said weepily. “Offer to shake when you know I can’t touch you.”

Finn put his hand down. “You’re…a ghost?”

“Don’t rub it in,” she snapped.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Finn said. “I can’t see through these, and I can’t take them off.” He pointed at his glasses.

Suddenly the glee was back in her voice. “I know—how delightfully dreadful. I must say, no one ever thought to black up my glasses when I was in school. I thought I had the worst bullies in history, but it is cheering to see someone else having it just as bad.” She giggled.

“What kind of spell would do this?” Finn asked. “He didn’t say any words when my glasses went black.”

He felt a wave of cold as Myrtle approached to within an inch of his face. “It’s no spell, you featherbrain. It’s ink.”

“Ink?”

Myrtle chortled. Then she sighed. “I supposed it will wash off in the sink.”

Finn tipped his head and wandered around (which also seemed to delight Myrtle) until he found the row of sinks on the wall. The first tap didn’t work at all, but the second did, and he spent a messy few minutes washing the ink off his glasses and then off himself. When he was done, he stood dripping, blinking at the translucent Myrtle and wishing he could push his glasses a little further up his nose: Draco had fixed them on just as they were sliding down.

“Better?” Myrtle asked with evident disappointment.

“Better,” Finn said. He looked around. “Hey, Myrtle, you said no one comes in here, right?”

She nodded.

“Would you mind if I kept my Mandrake in here? The light is perfect for him, and my roommates keep knocking him over.”

Myrtle shrugged. “As long as you don’t leave him in my toilet.” She pointed to a stall with the door open. 

“I promise. Thanks, Myrtle.” Suddenly he slapped his forehead. “Colin! I forgot all about him!”

And without another word to the toilet ghost, Finn rushed back out into the corridor—only to see Professor McGonagall casting a hover charm over Colin’s rigid body and pushing him gently down the stairs.


	9. Chapter 9

“Is Madame Pomfrey sure they can un-Petrify Colin?” Imogen asked for the hundredth time.

She and Finn were sitting in their usual spot in the shelter of the staircase. Lolly had just left them to return to the kitchens and study for an upcoming History of Magic quiz she didn’t have to take.

“They’ll find whoever’s doing this,” Finn said, knowing that’s what Imogen was really worried about. He was trying to study too, but Imogen’s fretting was making it hard to focus.

“Well, I wish they’d hurry up,” she said. 

“Was the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy established in 1689 or 1692?” he asked. “I have both dates in my notes.” He had been taking his own notes in Professor Binns’s class since Lolly had charmed his glasses, but he was starting to think that was a bad idea. He had always been rather hopeless in history, even in Muggle school.

“Signed in ’89, put into effect in ’92,” Imogen said absently. “Oh, hello, Sir Nicholas.”

The Gryffindor ghost was drifting listlessly through the stairs reading a much-crumpled ghost of a letter. “Oh, hello you two,” he sighed.

“What’s the matter, Sir Nick?” Finn asked, putting his notes away at the look on the ghost’s face.

Nick sighed again. “Oh, the usual trouble,” he said. “I do so wish I could join the Headless Hunt. Half an inch of gristle—that’s all!” He grabbed his hair and swiveled his head off his shoulders to demonstrate.

Finn shuddered but figured he should try to be sympathetic. “They won’t let you join the Headless Hunt just for that?”

“They say I can’t participate in the games,” Nick complained. “Because it won’t come off, you see. Can’t toss it around.”

“Would they let you be scorekeeper or something?” Finn asked.

Nick considered. “Perhaps. But I wouldn’t really be part of the Hunt. I’m a man of action, Mr. O’Flaherty—or at least, I was before I died. I’m not a ghost to sit on the sidelines.”

“Couldn’t you use a ball instead?” Imogen suggested.

“A ball?”

“Yes, a Quaffle maybe. It’s what everyone else uses when they can’t toss their heads around.”

“It’s not the same,” Nick sighed.

“No, it’s not,” Finn agreed. “But in the Muggle world, we have people who can’t play sports exactly the same way as everyone else, but they still play. There are leagues of people who play basketball in wheelchairs.”

“Basket-what?” Nick gaped. “What’s a wheelchair?”

“Never mind,” Finn said. “The point is, just because you can’t play the same way the Headless Hunt plays doesn’t mean you can’t play at all. There have got to be ten ghosts with their heads attached for every headless one: you could get up a team with the Fat Friar and the Grey Lady and maybe the Bloody Barron.”

Nick shuddered. “Not with him, I think.”

“Okay, but with the others. I bet even Moaning Myrtle would play if you asked her.”

Nick rubbed his chin, causing his head to wobble dangerously. “A Quaffle you say, eh?”

“There’s got to be a ghost with a Quaffle somewhere in Britain,” Imogen put in.

“Oh, yes,” Nick said. “There’s a chap down in Bristol who died in a Quidditch match with the Quaffle in his hand. Brought it with him into the afterlife and has been complaining for two hundred years that he has to chart it around with him.”

“There you go,” Finn said.

The light (if that’s what it could be called in a ghost) was coming back into Nick’s eyes and he floated a few inches higher off the floor. “You know, I think you may be onto something, children. The Headed Hunt. How’s that for a name? Or the Not-So-Headless Hunt? Or the Quaffle Hunt?”

“I’m sure you’ll settle on the right name,” Finn said.

Nick shot off the ground. “I’m going to go talk to the Fat Friar right now. I think he was up on the second floor a while ago. Cheerio, Mr. O’Flaherty, Miss Yang. Thank you!”

They waved as he sped away.

“Well,” Imogen said, “that’s one problem solved. Now have you solved the problem of the Heir of Slytherin?”

Finn smiled. “How about we start with passing tomorrow’s quiz?” he suggested.

But not ten minutes later, there was a commotion upstairs and Finn and Imogen were drawn, like all the other students in the corridors, to its epicenter on the second floor. 

“Someone else has been Petrified!” Imogen cried. “I can’t see who it is. Finn?”

Finn stood on his toes. “It’s Justin! He’s in my house!”

Then the crowd shifted and Imogen shrieked. “Sir Nicholas!”

For indeed, the ghost was floating motionless as a Muggle photograph about a foot above Justin’s body.

“Justin is Muggle-born,” someone in the crowd whispered.

“What kind of spell could Petrify a ghost?” asked someone else.

“Students will please return to their classes,” Professor McGonagall said firmly over the hum. “Prefects, you will escort them. Move along.”

Luna Lovegood appeared at Imogen’s side. “You look rather shaken,” she observed airily. “I’ll walk with you if you like.”

“What? Oh. Okay.” Imogen allowed Luna to lace their elbows together and lead her toward the stairs. 

Before the crowd parted them, Imogen looked back. “Be careful, Finn,” she said.

Finn watched her and Luna head off, but he hovered at the edge of the crowd until Professor Flitwick and Professor Sinistra had removed Justin to the hospital wing and most of the students had drifted away. Professor McGonagall was circling Sir Nicholas, trying to figure out how to move him, and Harry Potter was standing in a corner, trying to avoid the angry gaze of Ernie McMillan. Finn wanted to talk to Professor McGonagall, but he didn’t want to do it in front of the other students.

While he dithered in the shadows, he suddenly caught sight of Dumbledore at the head of the stairs, watching the proceedings gravely, his face grooved with worry lines. As though he could feel Finn’s eyes on him, the old headmaster suddenly looked up and met his gaze. He turned to go down the stairs and gestured for Finn to follow.

Finn trotted to catch up, then fell in step with the headmaster as he headed away from the commotion. Maybe Dumbledore was the one to talk to anyway.

“Can I help you, Mr. O’Flaherty?” he asked.

“It’s just, sir,” Finn began uncertainly, looking back at the scene of disaster, “I just sometimes wonder…if there hasn’t been a mistake.”

“A mistake about what?” Dumbledore asked.

“About me,” Finn confessed. “Whether there might have been a mix-up with the letters and I’m not supposed to be here.”

Dumbledore looked down at him through his half-moon spectacles and put a long-fingered hand on his shoulder. “No one receives a Hogwarts letter by mistake, Mr. O’Flaherty. You are exactly where you need to be.” He started to turn down a side passage, then turned back. “And so is Miss Yang, in case she was concerned.”

Finn stared at him with a mix of wonder and disbelief. “If you’re sure, sir.”

“Quite sure, Mr. O’Flaherty. Now, if you will return downstairs, I imagine everyone in the Hufflepuff common room could do with a mug of Lolly’s famous hot cocoa when they return from class. You don’t mind asking her as you pass the kitchens, I guess?” And with a wink, he disappeared through a half-open door.


	10. Chapter 10

The next day, Finn found Imogen at breakfast. “Can you meet me in the girls’ toilet on the second floor at lunch?”

Imogen had circles under her eyes from lack of sleep, but she sat bolt upright at his words. “Have you had a breakthrough? With Drake-O?”

“Not yet,” Finn said, “but I’m determined to. When the Mandrakes are ready, I want to be, too.”

Imogen wilted again. “It won’t make them ready any faster,” she said. “Colin and Justin and Nick are going to be Petrified until spring either way.”

“I can’t help that,” Finn said, filled with a fire of determination that Dumbledore seemed to have set going last night. “But I can do one thing, and that’s save the Mandrakes. Maybe that’s what I’m here to do.”

Imogen nodded. “I’ll bring Lolly,” she said.

It turned out it was lucky she did. Lolly, horrified at the thought of both her friends missing lunch, stepped out of Imogen’s bag and immediately snapped her fingers. Two plates of sandwiches and two mugs of pumpkin juice materialized on the floor.

“Finn O’Flaherty and Imogen Yang cannot think on an empty stomach,” she observed sagely, then settled herself on the edge of the broken sink to watch them eat.

The children, who really weren’t much in the habit of missing meals, dug gratefully into the sandwiches, all the while looking from the Mandrake in its pot on the windowsill to the unfinished Restorative Draught Finn had hidden under an overturned rubbish bin. Finn hadn’t worked on it since he rehoused Drake-O in the bathroom: there had to be something new he hadn’t tried.

“Finn,” Imogen said around a mouthful of tomato and mayonnaise, “is there a funny smell in here?”

Finn put down the crust of his sandwich and sniffed. “I mean, it’s a bathroom, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s something else. And what’s that sound?”

Lolly’s ears perked up and swiveled like satellite dishes. “Something is boiling,” she said.

The children got up and glanced into Moaning Myrtle’s stall. She wasn’t in it, but neither was anything else, besides the toilet. But in the next stall, they found a cauldron simmering over a little blue flame in the toilet bowl. Inside the cauldron a thick, yellowish potion bubbled sluggishly like mud in a hot-spring. It smelled vaguely of rotten egg.

“I wondered when you’d be back in here to find that,” came a voice from above them. They looked up to see Moaning Myrtle dropping through the ceiling; she settled down on the windowsill next to the Mandrake and put her chin on her fists. “You’ve been away ever so long, Finn.”

“I’m sorry, Myrtle,” Finn said. “It’s been…busy, out there.” He pointed at the potion. “What is this?”

Lolly had crept forward and poked her nose over the lip of the cauldron. “It is Polyjuice Potion,” she said.

“I’ve heard of that,” Imogen said. “But it’s not in _Magical Drafts and Potions_. How do you know about it, Lolly?”

“Lolly has finished the Potions textbook,” she explained, “so she has been reading in the library after Madame Pince goes to bed.” When they continued to blink at her, she said as if it were obvious, “A house elf does not need permission to enter the Restricted Section.”

“Who’s brewing this, Myrtle?” Finn asked.

She hummed in satisfaction at having a secret. “Guess!”

“Draco Malfoy?” he suggested, sniffing again at the dubious contents.

“Oh, my, but we are off the mark, aren’t we?” Myrtle said with relish.

“Harry Potter?” Imogen said.

Myrtle’s face fell. 

“The opposite of Malfoy is Harry,” Imogen explained when Finn gave her a questioning look.

“You didn’t have to guess so quickly,” Myrtle moped. “I was having fun.”

“But why would Harry want to make this stuff?” Finn asked. “It’s got to be against the rules.”

Imogen considered for a moment. “If what I’ve heard about him from Padma Patil and the second-year Ravenclaws is true, he breaks the rules quite a lot. But generally for a reason.”

Finn looked at the sullen bubbling of the Polyjuice Potion. “Wonder what the reason could be this time. Maybe…do you think it might be connected to the Heir of Slytherin? Maybe he’s looking for him or something.”

“Maybe he _is_ the Heir of Slytherin,” Myrtle suggested helpfully from her perch on the windowsill.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Finn said.

“Do you think we should…turn him in?” Imogen asked. “I mean, is it our duty or something?”

“No,” Finn said, thinking that was a very Ravenclaw thing to say. “If he _is_ looking for the Heir of Slytherin, I for one don’t want to stop him, do you? It’s not like the grown-ups have been making any progress, is it?” And to her credit, Imogen looked relieved.

“Fine,” Myrtle snapped. “Let’s ignore boring Moaning Myrtle and go on as if she isn’t here!”

“That’s not what we meant,” Finn said, but Myrtle gave a dramatic wail and swooped off the windowsill to dive into her toilet. As she went, the rush of air in her wake was so great that the Mandrake pot wobbled, spun on its edge…

“Look out, Finn O’Flaherty!” Lolly cried.

…and fell onto the tile floor.

The pot didn’t break, but the soil poured out in a heap and the Mandrake slid out on top of it, shrieking like a banshee. Lolly snapped her fingers and a pair of earmuffs materialized over Finn’s and Imogen’s ears. Lolly herself covered her bat-like ears with an irritated expression.

But even though they couldn’t hear Drake-O’s screams, the appearance of a pair of fluffy white earmuffs clamped to his head made Finn stumble backward in surprise. He knocked into Imogen and Imogen fell hard into the bubbling cauldron. It tipped off the toilet and rolled away, spewing a foul-smelling slick of yellowish potion across the floor and the two students sprawled on top of it. They yelped and leapt to their feet, trying to brush the hot goo from their robes.

Lolly’s look of shock turned into horror as Finn’s earmuffs fell from his head.

But Finn didn’t drop dead as the sound of the Mandrake’s cry reached his ears. He didn’t even faint, which was perhaps more likely given Drake-O’s age. He remained on his feet, staring at the unpotted Mandrake, who was no longer screaming. In fact, he was laughing uproariously and pointing a leafy finger in his direction.

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “Mandrakes have a sense of humor.”

Drake-O continued to laugh himself breathless, grabbing the edge of the cauldron that held the Restorative Draught to haul himself upright. He leaned on it weakly, wheezing.

“All right, that’s enough,” Finn said. “It wasn’t that funny.” Drake-O only doubled over again, laughing so hard he cried fat, milky tears into the cauldron. 

“Come on, you’re diluting it,” Finn complained, clapping his earmuffs back on and righting the Mandrake’s pot. He grabbed Drake-O by the leaves and plopped him back into the pot, shoveling handfuls of dirt on top of him until he was covered up to his forehead and the laughter was muffled by the soil. He returned the pot to the sill. “You can take your earmuffs off, Imogen.”

But Imogen wasn’t paying attention to him. She was staring at the overturned cauldron of Polyjuice Potion. Finn came over and pulled her muffs off.

“What have we done?” she breathed. “We’ve ruined it!”

“Do you think we could shovel it back in?” Finn suggested without conviction. Already the potion was congealing on the floor, and he wasn’t surprised when Imogen shook her head.

“Looks like it’s got to be kept at a boil,” she said. “What do we do, Finn?”

He shook his head. “You’re the Ravenclaw.”

Imogen looked surprised. “I am, aren’t I?” She paused in thought. “There’s only one thing we _can_ do: we’ve got to remake the Potion. Whatever Harry was making it for, he had to have a reason. We’ve got to remake it for him.”

Finn nodded in agreement. “Lolly, can you help us?”

“Lolly doesn’t know the recipe,” the house elf said sadly. “Lolly only read a little of _Moste Potente Potions_ , and it was weeks ago.”

“Then can you look it up tonight and copy the instructions for us?” he asked. “We’ll meet you in the kitchens before breakfast tomorrow.”

Lolly brightened. “Lolly can do that, Finn O’Flaherty!”

“Good,” Finn said. “Now we just have to hope Harry doesn’t come in here to check on it before we make a new batch.”

“It’s bound to be a complicated potion,” Imogen pointed out doubtfully. “Do you think we’re up to it?”

Finn grinned at her. “We’ve got two cooks and a Ravenclaw,” he said. “That ought to equal at least one second-year Gryffindor. Come on: let’s get this cleaned up before Myrtle comes back.”


	11. Chapter 11

But they encountered their first roadblock when they met with Lolly in the kitchens the next morning.

“ _Moste Potente Potions_ is not in the library!” she cried the minute she saw them.

This possibility hadn’t occurred to Finn. “Harry must have checked it out,” he said. “Of course he would.”

Lolly shook her head. “Not Harry Potter: Hermione Granger. Lolly checked Madame Pince’s log book.”

“Things are starting to make more sense now,” Imogen said. “I was wondering how Harry could make something like Polyjuice. He’s nice enough, but he’s not a star at Potions. Hermione has to be helping him. Doing it herself, more like it.” Then she added, “I wonder why she’s not a Ravenclaw. I think we’d get along—we have a lot in common.”

“But if Hermione has the book,” Finn said, thinking that if Hermione were a Ravenclaw she and Imogen would probably compete each other into the ground, “that means she’ll be keeping it in her room—in Gryffindor Tower. We can’t get in there.”

“Lolly can,” the house elf said, “but she cannot steal Hermione Granger’s book. It is against the house elf code.”

“Don’t worry, Lolly,” Finn said. “This is our mess to clean up, not yours. Besides, if we took the book, Hermione would be sure to notice, and then where would we be? They might give up on whatever it is they’re trying to do.”

“Get me in there,” Imogen said suddenly.

“What?”

“Get me into Gryffindor Tower and I’ll memorize the instructions. I’ll only need thirty seconds once I find the book.”

Finn rubbed his chin. “That second-year Neville Longbottom noticed I’m interested in Herbology,” he said. “He offered to tell me about some plant he’s all excited about. Mumbly-something. If I could catch him right after he gives the password…and keep him in the corridor talking while you slip in…maybe we could manage it.”

“Lolly will hide in the Gryffindor common room and tell Imogen Yang when Hermione is away,” the house elf volunteered.

Imogen nodded with fierce determination. “Saturday. We can wait all day if we have to.”

They didn’t have to wait all day. After breakfast on Saturday morning, Lolly appeared suddenly under the table in front of Finn as he was polishing off a glass of orange juice. The “pop!” of her materialization was lost in the general hubbub of the Great Hall at mealtime.

“Hermione Granger and Harry Potter have gone to visit Hagrid with their friend Ron Weasley,” she reported. “The Gryffindor common room is empty.”

Finn looked around at the Gryffindor table, where Neville Longbottom was folding his napkin and struggling a little to extricate himself from the bench. Then he glanced at the Ravenclaw table, saw Imogen looking at him, and gave her a nod.

They waited for Neville to make his way out of the Hall and then followed him surreptitiously (Lolly was in Imogen’s bag again) up the stairs to Gryffindor Tower. When he reached the painting of the Fat Lady, Imogen ducked behind a suit of armor and Finn hurried forward.

“Pig snout,” Neville said to the portrait.

“Dear, that password is almost a year out of date,” the Fat Lady said kindly.

“Oh. Yeah. Erm…wwuh—wattlebird?”

“Well, if you’re certain,” she said, and swung inward.

“Hey, Neville!” Finn called, jogging up before Neville could climb inside. “I’m glad I caught you.” He came around to Neville’s right so he had to turn his back on the portrait to talk to him. “What was that plant you were telling me about the other day?”

“What plant? Oh! The Mimbulus Mimbletonia. It’s the only known source of Stinksap, did you know that?”

“You don’t say,” Finn said, watching Imogen creep up behind Neville.

“Oh, yes,” Neville said enthusiastically. “I was reading about it in _One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi_.” His voice got wistful. “I’d love to own one someday.”

“Where would you get one?” Finn asked, launching Neville into a lengthy explanation of the plant’s range and natural habitat.

Imogen had reached the portrait hole, but the Fat Lady was still watching as she climbed through. She opened her mouth to raise the alarm when Lolly popped her head out of Imogen’s bag and laid a long finger to her lips. The Fat Lady looked so surprised to see a house elf slug over a student’s shoulder that she closed her mouth again. Imogen slipped through into the common room.

Finn kept Neville talking for another five minutes—not that it was difficult when Neville got started on his favorite subject. Finally, he saw Imogen climb back through and swing the portrait closed (the Fat Lady stared again at Lolly’s head poking from the bag) before tiptoeing back down the corridor. When she was safely on the stairs, Finn gently disengaged himself from the conversation.

“That’s really fascinating, Neville,” he said. “I hope you do get your Mimbulus Mimbletonia someday.”

Neville beamed and Finn headed off. From behind him, he heard Neville complain that the portrait had closed.

“Well, you can’t expect me to flap in the wind all day, can you?” the Fat Lady said in reply. “Now, once more, the password, if you can manage.”

Finn caught up with Imogen at the bottom of the stairs and they headed to the kitchens to confer.

“Did you find it?” he asked as they sat on the low stools around the hearth. Lolly popped out of the bag and smoothed her canvas frock with dignity.

“I found it,” Imogen said proudly. “Do you want me to write it down?”

“Best not,” Finn said. “We don’t want anyone to find it on us by accident. You won’t forget it, will you?”

Imogen gave him a “you must be joking” look. But then her expression turned worried. “There is a problem, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Polyjuice Potion takes a month to prepare. Based on the instructions, the potion we spilled was less than two weeks away from being finished.”

Finn blew out his cheeks. “So whatever they were planning on doing with it, they were planning on doing it—what? Around Christmas, right?”

Imogen nodded. “We’ll never make a substitute in time.”

“Never say never,” Finn said. “Why does it take so long to prepare?”

“Well, the fluxweed has to be picked at the full moon, for one thing.”

“The next full moon is tomorrow,” Lolly put in. They looked at her. “Astronomy class,” she explained.

“And the lacewing flies have to be stewed for twenty-one days,” Imogen added. They looked at Lolly, but this time the house elf shrugged sadly.

“And besides that,” Imogen went on, “the potion requires bicorn horn and boomslang skin. Those are restricted ingredients—the only place we’ll find those at Hogwarts are in Professor Snape’s private stores.”

“How did Harry get them, I wonder?” Finn mused. He hated to think what risks the older boy had taken: even a first-year Hufflepuff knew that Snape hated Harry.

“I just don’t see how we can do it,” Imogen said.

“Lolly can get into Professor Snape’s stores,” the house elf said quietly.

Again the children looked at her. “We couldn’t ask you to do that,” Finn said. “What if you got caught?”

Lolly patted his hand. “Lolly is a house elf,” she reminded him.

Finn put his hand on top of hers in thanks. “So that just leaves the lacewing flies, right?”

Imogen nodded. “If you don’t count, you know, actually putting the stuff together, which is no walk in the park, let me tell you.”

“I’m not worried about that,” Finn said. “We have you, don’t we?” Again he rubbed his chin. “Let me think about the lacewing flies. We’ll meet in Greenhouse One tomorrow night to harvest the fluxweed—I’ll try to figure something out by then. Okay?”

Lolly nodded her head until her ears flapped and Imogen took a deep breath. Finally, she said, “Okay.”


	12. Chapter 12

The moon was rising over the frosty lake when Finn crept into the greenhouse. He had had to wait a long time in the entrance hall for Filch to prowl off to some other corridor, so Imogen was already there. 

“I had to dodge Professor Flitwick to get out of Ravenclaw Tower,” she whispered as he approached. “The teachers are patrolling the corridors now: they’re nervous too.”

“I know,” Finn said. “Where’s Lolly?”

With a “pop!” the house elf appeared at his elbow and they both jumped. “Lolly is here,” she announced.

“The fluxweed is in the back corner over here,” Imogen said. “I already scoped it out.”

Skirting around the venomous tentacula that reached for their arms as they passed, the three made their way to the tray of spindly green stems blooming with purple flowers.

“Do we need the flowers or the greens?” Imogen asked. “The recipe doesn’t say.”

“The jars in the Potions cupboard have both,” Finn said. 

“The flowers bloom only in the full moon,” Lolly reported. “That is why they must be harvested only once a month.”

They set to work with clippers, snipping stems and flowers here and there where Professor Sprout wouldn’t notice unless she looked very closely. It didn’t take long before they had a fistful each, just the right amount for the Polyjuice.

“Well, Finn,” Imogen began when they had dutifully cleaned their clippers and put them away, “have you come up with a way to make lacewing flies stew three times as fast as they usually do?”

Finn rubbed a smudge of dirt from his nose. “I think so, actually.” Imogen looked a little incredulous, and he pressed on. “Did you know that eggs have a lot more nutrients than chicken?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Eggs have all the ingredients to make a chicken, squeezed into a little package. They’re like…chicken concentrate.”

“That’s kind of gross.”

“Anyway, I was thinking, wouldn’t lacewing eggs be the same as chicken eggs?”

“I guess.”

“The point of stewing the flies for so long is to release all the…the…whatever it is that’s in them. But the eggs have the same stuff, only concentrated, and not covered by a bug shell—what’s it called?”

“Exoskeleton.”

“Exactly. If we can use lacewing eggs instead of flies, the potion _should_ cure much faster.”

“Are you sure?”

“Only one way to find out.”

Imogen nodded, then said, “But how do we get lacewing eggs in the first place?”

“Lolly will borrow some from Professor Kettleburn before breakfast tomorrow,” Lolly said.

“Who in the world is Professor Kettleburn?” Finn asked.

“He’s the Care of Magical Creatures teacher,” Imogen answered. “You’ve seen him at the high table sometimes—older fellow, missing a few…parts.”

“Oh,” Finn said. “Why would he have lacewing eggs? They’re not magical creatures.”

“Someone has to raise lacewing flies for Potions,” Imogen pointed out. “And what do you mean ‘borrow,’ Lolly? You’re not giving them back after.”

“Lolly ordered replacement bicorn horn and boomslang skin when she sent the kitchen order to Hogsmead this morning,” she said. “They will arrive from London next week. She will order lacewing eggs next time and they will arrive the week after that. House elves do not steal,” she added primly.

“But if they trace the order back to you, Lolly, you could be in awful trouble with Professor Snape,” Imogen said.

“Why should a Hogwarts professor look at a house elf’s kitchen order?” Lolly asked, as though the answer was the most self-evident thing in the world.

Finn chuckled. “I wonder what the folks in Hogsmead think you’re cooking up in the kitchens here. Boomslang pie garnished with bicorn shavings.”

Imogen made a face. “Ew, Finn.”

“Well, it looks like we’re done here,” he said, gathering their fluxweed harvest into a bundle and stowing it under his robes. “Let’s meet back in Myrtle’s bathroom after Lolly _borrows_ the stuff from Potions tomorrow. Careful getting back to the castle.”

“Not to worry, Finn O’Flaherty,” Lolly said, and disappeared with a “pop!”

Lolly couldn’t Apparate into Professor Snape’s store room for fear that the sound of her coming and going would attract his attention. So Finn performed the function he seemed best at: he created a diversion.

“You want me to do _what_?” Imogen said when he explained.

They were sitting in Potions, leaning over a cauldron of half-finished sleeping draught, and Lolly’s ears were poking out of Imogen’s bag as she listened to their plan.

“When I’m stirring in the foxglove, you drop in the teaspoon of beetle eyes. I can’t do it myself: I need to hands for the foxglove.”

“But you’re not supposed to add the beetle eyes until after the foxglove has stewed for five minutes.”

“Exactly. It will look like an honest mistake, but the potion will boil over and make a terrific mess. Jump out of the way, though: I don’t want you to get hit too.”

“ _You’re_ going to get hit? What will it do to you?”

“It should just knock me out cold,” Finn said. Then he tipped his head thoughtfully. “There’s the tiniest chance I’ll die. Anyway, Snape will fix it, whatever happens.”

Imogen looked doubtful. “You have a lot more confidence in him than I do.”

Finn shrugged. “Professor Dumbledore wouldn’t keep him on staff if he couldn’t do his job,” he said. “But anyway, the whole point is to keep his eyes off the store room while Lolly is in there.”

Imogen did not look reassured. 

As Finn began to drop the dried foxglove into the potion, he watched Lolly out of the corner of his eye, stepping out of Imogen’s bag and weaving between the legs of tables, chairs, and students on her way to the front corner of the classroom. As the last foxglove withered in the steaming liquid, Finn nodded to Imogen. She grimaced in anticipation and held out the spoon.

“Now,” Finn muttered. “Quickly!”

Imogen closed her eyes and dropped the beetle eyes into the cauldron.

The last thing Finn saw was the flash of Imogen’s robe as she jerked away and the bright blue explosion of boiling potion. The next thing he knew, he was blinking up at the dungeon ceiling, feeling a little dizzy but remarkably well rested. Snape was leaning over him frowning.

“I suppose one of you added the beetle eyes too early?” he drawled. “Five points from Hufflepuff, five points from Ravenclaw. Clumsy, Mr. O’Flaherty. I expected more of you.”

Finn was surprised at how rotten he felt at disappointing the school’s least popular teacher. “Sorry, Professor,” he grunted, struggling to sit up. But Snape had already swept off, barking at a Ravenclaw who was about to add a whole beetle instead of just its eyes.

Imogen grabbed his elbow and helped him up. “Your heart stopped!” she hissed in his ear. “If Snape hadn’t been here, you’d have died!”

Finn put his hand on his chest: his heart beat steadily, if rather faster than usual. “I did tell you that might happen,” he said weakly. Snape had saved his life. And then he had walked away like it had been any old cure, like he did it every day. He didn’t know what to make of the moody Potions professor.

But as Finn clambered to his feet, he saw Lolly by the classroom door waving a phial, and his mood lifted: the diversion had worked.

Now all they had to do was brew the most complicated potion any of them had ever attempted.


	13. Chapter 13

“You’re sure Harry and the others haven’t come in here lately?” Imogen said for the third time to Moaning Myrtle as Finn and Lolly tore up bundles of knotgrass and dropped them into the boiling cauldron.

“You think I wouldn’t notice if Harry Potter had come into my bathroom?” Myrtle replied. “I don’t know why I should help you anyway,” she added. “You’re just using boring old Myrtle who has nothing better to do than sit in her toilet and watch for boys in the girls’ bathroom.”

“But you _don’t_ have anything better—” Imogen began, but Finn cut in.

“That’s not what’s going on, Myrtle,” he said. “We’ve all got our bit to do in this, and so do you. You’re a part of the team, just like the rest of us.”

Myrtle’s face, which had been on the point of crumpling, smoothed a little as she considered. “Do you mean that, Finn O’Flaherty?”

“ _Do_ you?” Imogen muttered under her breath as she took over the knotgrass.

“Of course I do,” Finn said pointedly to both of them.

“You really are a Hufflepuff,” Imogen said.

“Well,” Myrtle went on, flicking a pigtail coquettishly over her shoulder, “in any case, none of them have come in. Your Mandrake is getting rowdy, though.”

“Sorry about that,” Finn said.

“Oh, no, I don’t mind. He makes for a nice change, really.” Myrtle perched herself on the windowsill next to Drake-O and put her chin in her hands, watching their progress.

“Next is the lacewing flies,” Imogen said.

Finn pulled out the bottle Lolly had brought from Professor Kettleburn and poured the eggs into a pestle, then began to crush them with a mortar.

“What are you doing?” Imogen objected. “The recipe doesn’t say to squish them up.”

“Why waste all that time waiting for the coverings to dissolve in the potion?” Finn asked. “You don’t make scrambled eggs with the shells on.” He scraped the translucent gel into the cauldron and stirred it in.

“Now the recipe says to let it simmer for three weeks,” Imogen recited.

“Which we’re not going to do, so…?”

Imogen drew a breath. “Now you add the boomslang skin and the bicorn horn. They’re the last two ingredients, and it’s supposed to sit for two weeks after that.”

“Lolly?” Finn said, and the house elf produced the phial of powdered horn. Then she drew what looked like a dried banana peel from her ribbon belt.

“The recipe says to shred the skin,” Imogen said.

“Let’s shred it as fine as we can,” Finn said. “The smaller the pieces, the faster they rehydrate in the potion. Should save us a few days of curing time and catch us up to where the potion should have been at this point.”

The three fell to work, ripping the tough skin into miniscule pieces until their fingertips hurt, while Myrtle floated back and forth above them offering helpful advice.

“That piece is too big,” she said about a hundred times—and almost as often, she added, “I’d help, but” (with a sigh) “ghosts can’t shred. Such a pity.”

But in the end the skin was ready for the cauldron, and Finn tipped it in while Imogen added the phial of bicorn and Lolly stirred. Then they all went still, watching the murky brown fluid swirling lazily beneath a cloud of steam. 

“I’ll be right there!” a voice said at the bathroom door. “I just want to check on it.”

“It’s Hermione!” Imogen hissed. “She’s coming in!”

Even as she spoke, they heard the outer door swing open on grating hinges and a pair of shoes tapping across the tile.

“Under here,” Finn whispered desperately, bustling Lolly and Imogen under the dividing wall into the stall next door. They scrambled onto the toilet seat, Finn and Imogen hugging each other tightly to keep their balance, Lolly perching on Finn’s shoulder and hanging onto Imogen’s ponytail to stay there.

“Is that you, Myrtle?” they heard Hermione ask. “I thought I heard something.”

“Oh, no,” Myrtle sighed with melodramatic melancholy, “only me. Always only me.”

“You look very nice today, Myrtle,” Hermione said with equally exaggerated kindness. The stall door next to Finn and his friends squeaked open and they saw her feet as she stood looking into the cauldron. 

There was a long, agonizing pause. Then the feet disappeared, the shoes retreated across the tile, and the outer door groaned open again.

“Everything okay?” they heard Ron ask from outside.

“Everything looks fine,” Hermione said as the door swung closed behind her.

Finn, Imogen, and Lolly almost fell over themselves in their haste to scramble down from the toilet and get into the other stall. Seconds later, they were crowded around the cauldron staring. Inside, bubbling sluggishly, was the exact yellow, clay-like sludge that they had found in Hermione’s cauldron a few days before. It was emitting an unpleasant but blessedly familiar odor.

“We did it!” Imogen cried. “We made Polyjuice Potion!” She threw her arms around Finn and Lolly.

Finn hugged her back, hardly able to believe his eyes or his nose. The most complicated potion any of them had ever encountered, and they had managed it. And no one even knew. No one except….

“You saved our bacon just now, Myrtle,” Finn said, breaking off from the hug to look up at her on the window sill. “Thank you. There’s just one more thing we have to ask of you. And it may be the most important thing of all.”

Myrtle straightened up and saluted.

“Don’t breathe a word of this to any of them—not even Harry,” Finn said. “If they found out, they might not trust it—they might give up on their plan, whatever it is. So it’s vital that this be our secret. Can you do that, Myrtle?”

Myrtle smiled slyly. “Oh, I’m excellent at keeping secrets, Finn. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve heard in here in the last fifty years.”

He smiled back. “Thanks, Myrtle. You’re a brick.”

“Finn O’Flaherty,” Lolly said from the corner of the room, “is this the same Restorative Draught from last time we was here?”

Finn glanced over to the cauldron Lolly had taken out from under the upturned bin. “Yes, why?”

In response, the house elf waved him over and pointed at the contents. Finn gasped.

“What? What is it?” Imogen said, hurrying to their side. Myrtle hovered above them.

“It’s turned…lilac,” Finn whispered.

“Just as it is supposed to when the Mandrake is added,” Lolly explained, as though Imogen didn’t know the instructions by heart.

Imogen gripped Finn’s arm. “How did it happen?”

Finn looked up at Myrtle. “Has anyone touched this since we were last in here?”

Myrtle huffed. “So possessive. No: no one has touched the cauldron in the toilet and no one has touched this one. No one has touched any cauldron in this entire bathroom. Satisfied?”

“But that means it had to have happened when we were in here,” Imogen said. “Did some Polyjuice Potion splash into it?”

“No,” Finn said, thinking back. “But Drake-O’s tears did. Remember? He was laughing so hard he cried. I told him he was diluting it.” He returned his disbelieving gaze to the swirling potion in the cauldron. “Mandrake tears work the same as Mandrake bodies. Tears of laughter!”

Imogen’s grip on his arm tightened, and then suddenly she dropped her hand to her side. “But isn’t it—kind of pale, don’t you think? More gray than lilac?”

“But Drake-O isn’t mature yet,” Finn said. “If we—” (he dropped his voice to a whisper Drake-O couldn’t hear through his pot) “if we chopped him up right now” (raising his voice to normal again) “the draught would turn the same color. When they Mandrakes are mature, their tears will be full-strength. It’s simple chemistry.” He realized he was beaming. “Tears of laughter. We figured it out.”

Suddenly Imogen laughed herself.

“What?” Finn said.

“Nothing—” she gasped. “Nothing—I’m just picturing Professor Snape trying to make a dozen Mandrakes laugh so he can catch their tears!”

And that thought was so cheering that it carried them all the way through to the Christmas holidays.


	14. Chapter 14

Finn had never planned on going home for Christmas: his family couldn’t afford to fly him from Heathrow to Dublin and then drive all the way across the country in the old bakery van to pick him up. When Imogen discovered that if she went home for Christmas her holiday would be spent in the company of a particularly sour aunt visiting from Hong Kong, she opted to keep Finn company. Lolly, of course, lived in the castle.

So on Christmas Day, Finn convinced the house elf to share in the feast in the Great Hall, seated on a little stool under the table and concealed by the skirts of Imogen’s ankle-length Christmas dress. There were so few Hufflepuffs at Hogwarts over the holidays that Finn sat at the Ravenclaw table; the other Ravenclaws were engaged in pulling Christmas crackers at the far end, and so he, Imogen, and Lolly could talk uninterrupted.

“If you think about it,” he said around a mouthful of turkey leg (now that Lolly had told him they were Transfigured, he thought he could taste the chicken under the turkey flavor), “the three of us have gotten through fully half a year at Hogwarts. A Muggle, a Squib, and a house elf. Who would have thought it was possible?”

“Not this Squib,” Imogen said. “Or her parents, for that matter. Have another roll, Lolly.”

“What about it, Lolly?” Finn asked. “Now that you’ve got half a year of school in you, how do you feel about the future?”

Lolly turned the roll over in her long-fingered hands. “Lolly baked this roll,” she said. “Service is a noble way of life, perhaps the most noble—so we house elves believe. But Lolly thinks…perhaps she would like to be a teacher someday. A teacher for house elves. Lolly thinks house elves may find there are other things they can do. Important things, maybe.”

Finn smiled at her. “I have no doubt of that. Hey, look over there!”

Over at the Gryffindor table, Harry, Ron, and Hermione were rising and making their way toward the door. There was a purposefulness about their movements and a surreptitiousness to the looks they cast at the teachers on the dais that said this moment was significant.

“This is it,” Finn said to Imogen and Lolly. “Whatever they’re doing with the Polyjuice Potion, it’s happening right now.”

Imogen watched them go. “I hope they know what they’re doing,” she said.

“I hope they get what they need,” Finn said. “I suppose we’ll never find out.”

They ate more than was probably good for them of the puddings that had appeared after the main course vanished, and when Lolly said she couldn’t eat any more, Imogen opened her bag for her and stood up.

“Half a year down, six and a half to go,” she said as though their conversation hadn’g been interrupted. “But we’ll worry about that tomorrow, I guess. Want to play exploding snap in the kitchens?” She turned to Lolly, who nodded.

But something about that idea—half a year down, six and a half to go—made the feast he’d just eaten sit like a rock in Finn’s stomach.

“You go on,” he said, looking up at the high table. “I’ll catch up in a few minutes.”

Imogen shrugged (Lolly, who by now was in the bag on her shoulder, bobbed up and down) and headed toward the door. Finn went in the opposite direction, reaching the dais just as Dumbledore was rising from his seat, still wearing the feathered hat he had gotten from a Christmas cracker.

“Merry Christmas, Professor,” Finn said.

Dumbledore turned and looked down at him. “Why, merry Christmas, Mr. O’Flaherty. I hope you enjoyed the feast, though I must say you don’t look it.”

“Oh, I enjoyed it very much, sir. But Professor, could I talk to you for a moment?” He glanced at Snape and McGonagall, who were watching the exchange with interest. “In private?”

“Of course, Finn, of course.” Dumbledore waved him to a side door behind the dais. “This way.”

Finn followed him through the door and found himself in a meeting room of sorts. He wondered if it was the teachers’ lounge. There was a cozy fire going in the grate and Dumbledore waved him into one of the armchairs that flanked it before perching on the edge of the other himself. “What can I do for you, Mr. O’Flaherty?” he asked.

“Well, sir,” Finn began uncertainly, “That night, the night Justin was Petrified, you told me…you told me it wasn’t a mistake that I was here.”

“I recall,” Dumbledore said, looking at him over the rim of his spectacles.

“You said I was _supposed_ to be here, and so was Imogen.”

“As indeed you are.”

Finn waited for Dumbledore to go on, but he didn’t. Clearly the headmaster wasn’t going to volunteer anything. Finn sighed. “Sir, you know I’m a Muggle, right?”

Dumbledore’s eyes twinkled. “Of course I do, Mr. O’Flaherty. And I know Miss Yang is a Squib.”

“Then why…just, _why_ , sir? Why send us our letters when we couldn’t pass our classes?”

“But you can pass your classes,” Dumbledore said. “In fact, Professor Snape has—with some reluctance—mentioned that you are—”

“A natural at Potions,” Finn finished for him. “But do you have any idea what we’ve been doing to pass our other classes?”

Again the twinkling eyes. “Do you refer to smuggling a house elf into your classrooms? Well, and why shouldn’t you? Lolly wants to learn, and you two aren’t magic. It seems an even exchange to me. I should attempt to enroll in double classes with Ravenclaw next year, by the way. You’ll need Lolly as much as Imogen does once your current wand is replaced. Speaking of which, this is for you.”

He reached into his robe and drew out a stout black wand. “Walnut and unicorn hair. Keep it under wraps until next September, won’t you? It belonged to someone I believe you know now as Moaning Myrtle.”

“That’s Myrtle’s wand?” Finn asked.

“Oh yes. She came to see me a week or so ago—caught me just as I was about to take a bath. I think you know she favors bathrooms. Quite a shock when she popped up through the drain plug, I don’t mind telling you.”

Finn nodded, trying to get the image of Dumbledore in a bath out of his mind. 

“Anyway, the wand has been in the keeping of the headmaster since her death half a century ago, and she told me that night that she wanted you to have it.”

Finn took the wand gingerly in his hands. “Did she say why?”

“I thought you might know that,” Dumbledore said. “But if pressed, I would say that a little kindness goes a long way, wouldn’t you?” His eyes twinkled in the firelight. “It won’t make you magic, Finn, but it might give you some confidence. It might even make a few sparks if you ask it nicely, and as any conjurer knows, illusion is part of the magic. But I stand by what I said earlier: take double classes with Ravenclaw wherever you can. Even Lolly can’t be in two places at once.”

Finn put the wand reverently in the pocket of his robes. Then he looked back up at Dumbledore doubtfully. “But it’s cheating, sir.”

“You don’t think it’s cheating, do you?”

“Well, no, and I told Imogen so. I just didn’t figure the headmaster would see it the same way.”

Dumbledore folded his long fingers into a steeple. “You know, Finn, just before Sir Nicholas was Petrified— _just_ before, mind you—he zoomed past me in a tizzy of excitement over a new sport he was inventing for ghosts who had the misfortune of not being headless. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I got the impression you were the one who gave him the idea.”

“Well, I guess so, yes.”

“And why are you and Imogen—and for that matter, Lolly—any different from Sir Nicholas? There are things you want to do that you cannot do, and so you find a path around your obstacles and do them anyway.” His gaze wandered off toward the ceiling. “You know, I have often wondered whether we might do better to treat education more as a collaborative effort than an individual one.”

Finn felt himself bristling. “Do you mean you brought Imogen and me here as guinea pigs? We’re here to prove some pet theory of yours?”

Dumbledore looked back down in surprise. “Not at all, my dear boy. That has merely been a side effect, though, I think, a salubrious one. No, no, Finn: I brought you here because, to be perfectly frank, I am trying to make up for a misspent youth.”

“You, sir?”

The old man nodded. “I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say I have learned a thing or two since my early days, and one of the things I have learned is that the world is not a very fair place. Muggles are not allowed in the Wizarding world. Squibs are not allowed at Hogwarts. House elves are not allowed to own wands.”

“Not that they need them,” Finn pointed out.

“Though what could they accomplish if they _had_ them?” Dumbledore asked earnestly. “These are the questions that keep me up at night, Mr. O’Flaherty. Well, those and many others. I do not sleep much these days, I’m afraid.”

“So you admitted a Muggle and a Squib to try to make things fairer, more even?”

Dumbledore opened his hands. “An empty gesture, you might say. What are one Muggle and one Squib in the grand scheme of things?” Finn nodded. “Well, perhaps you’re right. I am a foolish old man and no doubt I will continue to do foolish things until I’m too old to do them anymore. But another thing I’ve learned, Mr. O’Flaherty, is that one person _can_ make a difference. And in your case you have three persons. And that is something, is it not?”

“But what can we possibly accomplish?” Finn asked, repeating the Sorting Hat’s question from his very first night at the school. “What can we even _do_ in the Wizarding world?”

“Oh, any number of things, I’d imagine,” Dumbledore said. “You’d be surprised how many things you can do without a wand, Finn, in the world as much as at school. You could be a scholar, or a potion-maker, or a gamekeeper—which is no unimportant task, let me tell you. Madame Hooch has told me Miss Yang shows great potential on a broom: perhaps she’ll find her way as a professional Quidditch captain. There was a Squib almost a century ago who made quite a showing as a Muggle rugby player, you know. Buchanan, his name was. Failing that, Imogen could take over the library here when Madame Pince retires: she already has half the books memorized.”

“And what if I just want to be a cook?” Finn asked.

The headmaster smiled. “Wizards have to eat too, Mr. O’Flaherty.”

Then a thought occurred to Finn that ran like cold water down his spine. “How will we keep it from the teachers?”

“Oh, the teachers know,” Dumbledore said. “Most of them, anyway. Professor McGonagall and Professor Sprout planned it with me from the beginning. Professor Flitwick figured it out, of course, but he’s a good soul and he doesn’t mind. And Professor Snape—”

“Snape knows?”

Dumbledore nodded. “Well, I won’t say he was pleased, Finn, but it was hard for him to dismiss you after you brewed a perfect cure for boils on the first day of school—and then let him test it out on you in front of the whole class.” He was smiling again.

“But the others? Professor Sinistra, and Madame Hooch, and Professor Kettleburn?”

“We’ll deal with them as they come, _if_ they come. Professor Binns has more than once reported your marks to me under the name of Seamus Finnegan, so I doubt he’ll ever know _who_ you are, much less _what_ you are.”

Finn looked down at his hands twisted in his lap. He hadn’t realized how much he’d wanted to hear what Dumbledore was telling him. He wondered if an even deeper hope might be true as well. Could they maybe even be…special? 

“Professor,” he began, “why did you pick us, specifically? Imogen and me.”

Dumbledore looked away evasively. “Oh. I’m afraid you’ll be rather disappointed in me, but I have to say it was quite at random.”

“Random?” Finn repeated, his heart sinking.

“Well, random from my point of view,” Dumbledore said. “There are forces at work other than the will of wizards, you know, and even I don’t pretend to understand how they go about things.”

“I see,” Finn said glumly.

“I don’t think you do,” Dumbledore insisted. “It is a particular quirk in wizards, Mr. O’Flaherty, that they are constantly seeking chosen ones—the subjects of prophecy, saviors and destroyers. There’s something to it, maybe; I myself have spent some time studying prophecies. But Finn, never underestimate what an ordinary person can do with extraordinary heart. It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. Oh, I rather like that, don’t you?” He repeated the sentence to himself. “Our choices that show what we truly are. I may have to use that again.”

Finn looked up from his knotted fingers. “So you really think Imogen and I can…can do something worth doing here?”

Dumbledore’s face was suddenly very serious. “Indeed, Finn, I believe you already have.”

“You do, sir?”

“Well, for one thing, that vanishing cabinet on the third floor: I’ve never been quite comfortable about it, and I can’t say I’m sorry it was broken.”

“How did you know we—”

“And Professor Sprout has told me you’ve discovered a way to make the Restorative Draught without chopping up the poor Mandrakes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“There, you see? Already you are making the world a little fairer. And any other…side projects you might have had a hand in while you were working on it…well.” He winked and Finn stared at him open-mouthed.

There a pause until Finn could get his mouth shut again. He nodded slowly. “Perhaps I should get going, sir.” He rose and stumbled toward the door back into the Hall.

“Professor Sprout didn’t tell me how it’s done,” Dumbledore called after him. “With the Mandrakes.”

“Oh,” Finn said, turning around with his hand on the doorknob. “You have to make them laugh until they cry. It’s the tears that do it.”

Dumbledore chuckled. “Tears of laughter, is it? My, my. Professor Snape will love that. Now, my boy, why don’t you go join your friends in the kitchens? See if Lolly will let you make her some of _your_ hot cocoa for once.”

“Yes, sir,” Finn said. “And…thank you, sir.” He opened the door and the light from the Great Hall spilled into the room.

“And Finn?” Dumbledore said.

“Yes, Professor?”

He smiled. “Welcome to Hogwarts.”

The End


End file.
